Autobiography and Selected Essays - 93beast.fea.st93beast.fea.st/files/section1/huxley/extras/Auto and Essays.pdf · His autobiography gives a full account of his parents, his early

Autobiography and Selected EssaysThomas Henry Huxley

Table of ContentsAutobiography and Selected Essays..................................................................................................................1

Thomas Henry Huxley.............................................................................................................................1PREFACE................................................................................................................................................1

INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................................................2I. THE LIFE OF HUXLEY.....................................................................................................................2II. SUBJECT−MATTER, STRUCTURE, AND STYLE.......................................................................8III. SUGGESTED STUDIES IN SUBJECT−MATTER, STRUCTURE, AND STYLE......................9AUTOBIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................12ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE..................................17A LIBERAL EDUCATION .................................................................................................................25ON A PIECE OF CHALK ....................................................................................................................28THE PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION ..............................................................................40THE METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION .......................................................................44ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE ...............................................................................................48ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS .....................................................................................................55

Autobiography and Selected Essays

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Thomas Henry Huxley

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PREFACE• INTRODUCTION•

I. THE LIFE OF HUXLEY• II. SUBJECT−MATTER, STRUCTURE, AND STYLE• III. SUGGESTED STUDIES IN SUBJECT−MATTER, STRUCTURE, AND STYLE• AUTOBIOGRAPHY • ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE• A LIBERAL EDUCATION • ON A PIECE OF CHALK • THE PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION • THE METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION • ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE • ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS •

This etext was prepared by Donald Lainson, [email protected].

PREFACE

The purpose of the following selections is to present to students of English a few of Huxley's representativeessays. Some of these selections are complete; others are extracts. In the latter case, however, they are notextracts in the sense of being incomplete wholes, for each selection given will be found to have, in Aristotle'sphrase, "a beginning, a middle, and an end." That they are complete in themselves, although only parts ofwhole essays, is due to the fact that Huxley, in order to make succeeding material clear, often prepares theway with a long and careful definition. Such is the nature of the extract A Liberal Education, in reality adefinition to make distinct and forcible his ideas on the shortcomings of English schools. Such a definition,also, is The Method of Scientific Investigation.

The footnotes are those of the author. Other notes on the text have been included for the benefit of schoolsinadequately equipped with reference books. It is hoped, however, that the notes may be found not to be sonumerous as to prevent the training of the student in a self−reliant and scholarly use of dictionaries andreference books; it is hoped, also, that they may serve to stimulate him to trace out for himself morecompletely any subject connected with the text in which he may feel a peculiar interest. It should berecognized that notes are of value only as they develop power to read intelligently. If unintelligently reliedupon, they may even foster indifference and lazy mental habits.

I wish to express my obligation to Miss Flora Bridges, whose careful reading of the manuscript has beenmost helpful, and to Professor Clara F. Stevens, the head of the English Department at Mount HolyokeCollege, whose very practical aid made this volume possible.

A. L. F. S.

Autobiography and Selected Essays 1

INTRODUCTION

I. THE LIFE OF HUXLEY

Of Huxley's life and of the forces which moulded his thought, the Autobiography gives some account; butmany facts which are significant are slighted, and necessarily the later events of his life are omitted. Tosupplement the story as given by him is the purpose of this sketch. The facts for this account are gatheredentirely from the Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, by his son. For a real acquaintance with Huxley,the student should consult this source for himself; he will count the reading of the Life and Letters among therare pleasures which have come to him through books.

Thomas Henry Huxley was born on May 4, 1825. His autobiography gives a full account of his parents, hisearly boyhood, and his education. Of formal education, Huxley had little; but he had the richer schoolingwhich nature and life give an eager mind. He read widely; he talked often with older people; he was alwaysinvestigating the why of things. He kept a journal in which he noted thoughts gathered from books, and ideason the causes of certain phenomena. In this journal he frequently wrote what he had done and had set himselfto do in the way of increasing his knowledge. Self−conducted, also, was his later education at the CharingCross Hospital. Here, like Stevenson in his university days, Huxley seemed to be idle, but in reality, he wasalways busy on his own private end. So constantly did he work over the microscope that the window at whichhe sat came to be dubbed by his fellow students "The Sign of the Head and Microscope." Moreover, in hisregular courses at Charing Cross, he seems to have done work sufficiently notable to be recognized byseveral prizes and a gold medal.

Of his life after the completion of his medical course, of his search for work, of his appointment as assistantsurgeon on board the Rattlesnake, and of his scientific work during the four years' cruise, Huxley gives avivid description in the autobiography. As a result of his investigations on this voyage, he published variousessays which quickly secured for him a position in the scientific world as a naturalist of the first rank. Atestimony of the value of this work was his election to membership in the Royal Society.

Although Huxley had now, at the age of twenty−six, won distinction in science, he soon discovered that itwas not so easy to earn bread thereby. Nevertheless, to earn a living was most important if he were toaccomplish the two objects which he had in view. He wished, in the first place, to marry Miss HenriettaHeathorn of Sydney, to whom he had become engaged when on the cruise with the Rattlesnake; his secondobject was to follow science as a profession. The struggle to find something connected with science whichwould pay was long and bitter; and only a resolute determination to win kept Huxley from abandoning italtogether. Uniform ill−luck met him everywhere. He has told in his autobiography of his troubles with theAdmiralty in the endeavor to get his papers published, and of his failure there. He applied for a position toteach science in Toronto; being unsuccessful in this attempt, he applied successively for variousprofessorships in the United Kingdom, and in this he was likewise unsuccessful. Some of his friends urgedhim to hold out, but others thought the fight an unequal one, and advised him to emigrate to Australia. Hehimself was tempted to practice medicine in Sydney; but to give up his purpose seemed to him likecowardice. On the other hand, to prolong the struggle indefinitely when he might quickly earn a living inother ways seemed like selfishness and an injustice to the woman to whom he had been for a long timeengaged. Miss Heathorn, however, upheld him in his determination to pursue science; and his sister also, hewrites, cheered him by her advice and encouragement to persist in the struggle. Something of the man'sheroic temper may be gathered from a letter which he wrote to Miss Heathorn when his affairs were darkest."However painful our separation may be," he says, "the spectacle of a man who had given up the cherishedpurpose of his life . . . would, before long years were over our heads, be infinitely more painful." He declaresthat he is hemmed in by all sorts of difficulties. "Nevertheless the path has shown itself a fair one, neithermore difficult nor less so than most paths in life in which a man of energy may hope to do much if he


INTRODUCTION 2

believes in himself, and is at peace within." Thus relieved in mind, he makes his decision in spite of adversefate. "My course of life is taken, I will not leave London−−I WILL make myself a name and a position aswell as an income by some kind of pursuit connected with science which is the thing for which Nature hasfitted me if she has ever fitted any one for anything."

But suddenly the long wait, the faith in self, were justified, and the turning point came. "There is always aCape Horn in one's life that one either weathers or wrecks one's self on," he writes to his sister. "Thank God, Ithink I may say I have weathered mine−−not without a good deal of damage to spars and rigging though, forit blew deuced hard on the other side." In 1854 a permanent lectureship was offered him at the GovernmentSchool of Mines; also, a lectureship at St. Thomas' Hospital; and he was asked to give various other lecturecourses. He thus found himself able to establish the home for which he had waited eight years. In July, 1855,he was married to Miss Heathorn.

The succeeding years from 1855 to 1860 were filled with various kinds of work connected with science:original investigation, printing of monographs, and establishing of natural history museums. His adviceconcerning local museums is interesting and characteristically expressed. "It [the local museum if properlyarranged] will tell both natives and strangers exactly what they want to know, and possess great scientificinterest and importance. Whereas the ordinary lumber−room of clubs from New Zealand, Hindu idols, sharks'teeth, mangy monkeys, scorpions, and conch shells−− who shall describe the weary inutility of it? It is reallyworse than nothing, because it leads the unwary to look for objects of science elsewhere than under theirnoses. What they want to know is that their 'America is here,' as Wilhelm Meister has it." During this period,also, he began his lectures to workingmen, calling them Peoples' Lectures. "POPULAR lectures," he said, "Ihold to be an abomination unto the Lord." Working−men attended these lectures in great numbers, and tothem Huxley seemed to be always able to speak at his best. His purpose in giving these lectures should beexpressed in his own words: "I want the working class to understand that Science and her ways are great factsfor them−−that physical virtue is the base of all other, and that they are to be clean and temperate and all therest−−not because fellows in black and white ties tell them so, but because there are plain and patent lawswhich they must obey 'under penalties.'"

Toward the close of 1859, Darwin's "Origin of Species" was published. It raised a great outcry in England;and Huxley immediately came forward as chief defender of the faith therein set forth. He took part in debateson this subject, the most famous of which was the one between himself and Bishop Wilberforce at Oxford.The Bishop concluded his speech by turning to Huxley and asking, "Was it through his grandfather orgrandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey?" Huxley, as is reported by an eye−witness, "slowly anddeliberately arose. A slight tall figure, stern and pale, very quiet and grave, he stood before us and spokethose tremendous words. . . . He was not ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor; but he would beashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth." Another story indicates thetemper of that time. Carlyle, whose writing had strongly influenced Huxley, and whom Huxley had come toknow, could not forgive him for his attitude toward evolution. One day, years after the publication of Man'sPlace in Nature, Huxley, seeing Carlyle on the other side of the street, a broken, pathetic figure, walked overand spoke to him. The old man merely remarked, "You're Huxley, aren't you? the man that says we are alldescended from monkeys," and passed on. Huxley, however, saw nothing degrading to man's dignity in thetheory of evolution. In a wonderfully fine sentence he gives his own estimate of the theory as it affects man'sfuture on earth. "Thoughtful men once escaped from the blinding influences of traditional prejudices, willfind in the lowly stock whence man has sprung the best evidence of the splendour of his capacities; and willdiscover, in his long progress through the past, a reasonable ground of faith in his attainment of a noblerfuture." As a result of all these controversies on The Origin of Species and of investigations to upholdDarwin's theory, Huxley wrote his first book, already mentioned, Man's Place in Nature.

To read a list of the various kinds of work which Huxley was doing from 1870 to 1875 is to be convinced ofhis abundant energy and many interests. At about this time Huxley executed the plan which he had had in


INTRODUCTION 3

mind for a long time, the establishment of laboratories for the use of students. His object was to furnish amore exact preliminary training. He complains that the student who enters the medical school is "sohabituated to learn only from books, or oral teaching, that the attempt to learn from things and to get hisknowledge at first hand is something new and strange." To make this method of teaching successful in theschools, Huxley gave practical instruction in laboratory work to school−masters.

"If I am to be remembered at all," Huxley once wrote, "I would rather it should be as a man who did his bestto help the people than by any other title." Certainly as much of his time as could be spared from his regularwork was given to help others. His lectures to workingmen and school−masters have already been mentioned.In addition, he lectured to women on physiology and to children on elementary science. In order to be ofgreater service to the children, Huxley, in spite of delicate health, became a member of the London SchoolBoard. His immediate object was "to temper book−learning with something of the direct knowledge ofNature." His other purposes were to secure a better physical training for children and to give them a clearerunderstanding of social and moral law. He did not believe, on the one hand, in overcrowding the curriculum,but, on the other hand, he "felt that all education should be thrown open to all that each man might know towhat state in life he was called." Another statement of his purpose and beliefs is given by ProfessorGladstone, who says of his work on the board: "He resented the idea that schools were to train eithercongregations for churches or hands for factories. He was on the Board as a friend of children. What hesought to do for the child was for the child's sake, that it might live a fuller, truer, worthier life."

The immense amount of work which Huxley did in these years told very seriously on his naturally weakconstitution. It became necessary for him finally for two successive years to stop work altogether. In 1872 hewent to the Mediterranean and to Egypt. This was a holiday full of interest for a man like Huxley who lookedupon the history of the world and man's place in the world with a keen scientific mind. Added to thisscientific bent of mind, moreover, Huxley had a deep appreciation for the picturesque in nature and life. Bitsof description indicate his enjoyment in this vacation. He writes of his entrance to the Mediterranean, "It wasa lovely morning, and nothing could be grander than Ape Hill on one side and the Rock on the other, lookinglike great lions or sphinxes on each side of a gateway." In Cairo, Huxley found much to interest him inarchaeology, geology, and the every−day life of the streets. At the end of a month, he writes that he is verywell and very grateful to Old Nile for all that he has done for him, not the least "for a whole universe of newthoughts and pictures of life." The trip, however, did no lasting good. In 1873 Huxley was again very ill, butwas under such heavy costs at this time that another vacation was impossible. At this moment, a critical onein his life, some of his close scientific friends placed to his credit twenty−one hundred pounds to enable himto take the much needed rest. Darwin wrote to Huxley concerning the gift: "In doing this we are convincedthat we act for the public interest." He assured Huxley that the friends who gave this felt toward him as abrother. "I am sure that you will return this feeling and will therefore be glad to give us the opportunity ofaiding you in some degree, as this will be a happiness to us to the last day of our lives." The gift made itpossible for Huxley to take another long vacation, part of which was spent with Sir Joseph Hooker, a notedEnglish botanist, visiting the volcanoes of Auvergne. After this trip he steadily improved in health, with noother serious illness for ten years.

In 1876 Huxley was invited to visit America and to deliver the inaugural address at Johns HopkinsUniversity. In July of this year accordingly, in company with his wife, he crossed to New York. EverywhereHuxley was received with enthusiasm, for his name was a very familiar one. Two quotations from his addressat Johns Hopkins are especially worthy of attention as a part of his message to Americans. "It has been myfate to see great educational funds fossilise into mere bricks and mortar in the petrifying springs ofarchitecture, with nothing left to work them. A great warrior is said to have made a desert and called it peace.Trustees have sometimes made a palace and called it a university."

The second quotation is as follows:−−


INTRODUCTION 4

I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness or your material resources, as such.Size is not grandeur, territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs true sublimity, andthe terror of overhanging fate, is, what are you going to do with all these things? . . .

The one condition of success, your sole safeguard, is the moral worth and intellectual clearness of theindividual citizen. Education cannot give these, but it can cherish them and bring them to the front inwhatever station of society they are to be found, and the universities ought to be, and may be, the fortresses ofthe higher life of the nation.

After the return from America, the same innumerable occupations were continued. It would be impossible inshort space even to enumerate all Huxley's various publications of the next ten years. His work, however,changed gradually from scientific investigation to administrative work, not the least important of which wasthe office of Inspector of Fisheries. A second important office was the Presidency of the Royal Society. Ofthe work of this society Sir Joseph Hooker writes: "The duties of the office are manifold and heavy; theyinclude attendance at all the meetings of the Fellows, and of the councils, committees, and sub−committeesof the Society, and especially the supervision of the printing and illustrating all papers on biological subjectsthat are published in the Society's Transactions and Proceedings; the latter often involving a protractedcorrespondence with the authors. To this must be added a share in the supervision of the staff officers, of thelibrary and correspondence, and the details of house−keeping." All the work connected with this and manyother offices bespeaks a life too hard−driven and accounts fully for the continued ill− health which finallyresulted in a complete break−down.

Huxley had always advocated that the age of sixty was the time for "official death," and had looked forwardto a peaceful "Indian summer." With this object in mind and troubled by increasing ill− health, he began in1885 to give up his work. But to live even in comparative idleness, after so many years of activity, wasdifficult. "I am sure," he says, "that the habit of incessant work into which we all drift is as bad in its way asdram−drinking. In time you cannot be comfortable without stimulus." But continued bodily weakness toldupon him to the extent that all work became distasteful. An utter weariness with frequent spells of the bluestook possession of him; and the story of his life for some years is the story of the long pursuit of health inEngland, Switzerland, and especially in Italy.

Although Huxley was wretchedly ill during this period, he wrote letters which are good to read for theirhumor and for their pictures of foreign cities. Rome he writes of as an idle, afternoony sort of place fromwhich it is difficult to depart. He worked as eagerly over the historic remains in Rome as he would over acollection of geological specimens. "I begin to understand Old Rome pretty well and I am quite learned in theCatacombs, which suit me, as a kind of Christian fossils out of which one can reconstruct the body of theprimitive Church." Florence, for a man with a conscience and ill−health, had too many picture galleries."They are a sore burden to the conscience if you don't go to see them, and an awful trial to the back and legsif you do," he complained. He found Florence, nevertheless, a lovely place and full of most interesting thingsto see and do. His letters with reference to himself also are vigorously and entertainingly expressed. He writesin a characteristic way of his growing difficulty with his hearing. "It irritates me not to hear; it irritates mestill more to be spoken to as if I were deaf, and the absurdity of being irritated on the last ground irritates mestill more." And again he writes in a more hopeful strain, "With fresh air and exercise and careful avoidanceof cold and night air I am to be all right again." He then adds: "I am not fond of coddling; but as Paddy gavehis pig the best corner in his cabin−−because 'shure, he paid the rint'−−I feel bound to take care of myself as ahousehold animal of value, to say nothing of other points."

Although he was never strong after this long illness, Huxley began in 1889 to be much better. The first signof returning vigor was the eagerness with which he entered into a controversy with Gladstone. Huxley hadalways enjoyed a mental battle; and some of his fiercest tilts were with Gladstone. He even found the causeof better health in this controversy, and was grateful to the "Grand Old Man" for making home happy for


INTRODUCTION 5

him. From this time to his death, Huxley wrote a number of articles on politics, science, and religion, many ofwhich were published in the volume called Controverted Questions. The main value of these essays lies in thefact that Huxley calls upon men to give clear reasons for the faith which they claim as theirs, and makes, as afriend wrote of him, hazy thinking and slovenly, half−formed conclusions seem the base thing they really are.

The last years of Huxley's life were indeed the longed−for Indian summer. Away from the noise of London atEastbourne by the sea, he spent many happy hours with old−time friends and in his garden, which was a greatjoy to him. His large family of sons and daughters and grandchildren brought much cheer to his last days.Almost to the end he was working and writing for publication. Three days before his death he wrote to his oldfriend, Hooker, that he didn't feel at all like "sending in his checks" and hoped to recover. He died veryquietly on June 29, 1895. That he met death with the same calm faith and strength with which he had met lifeis indicated by the lines which his wife wrote and which he requested to be his epitaph:−−

Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep; For still He giveth His beloved sleep, And if an endless sleep Hewills, so best.

To attempt an analysis of Huxley's character, unique and bafflingly complex as it is, is beyond the scope ofthis sketch; but to give only the mere facts of his life is to do an injustice to the vivid personality of the manas it is revealed in his letters. All his human interest in people and things−−pets, and flowers, and family−−brightens many pages of the two ponderous volumes. Now one reads of his grief over somebackward−going plant, or over some garden tragedy, as "A lovely clematis in full flower, which I had spenthours in nailing up, has just died suddenly. I am more inconsolable than Jonah!" Now one is amused with anonsense letter to one of his children, and again with an account of a pet. "I wish you would write seriously toM−−−−. She is not behaving well to Oliver. I have seen handsomer kittens, but few more lively, andenergetically destructive. Just now he scratched away at something M−−−− says cost 13s. 6d. a yard andreduced more or less of it to combings. M−−−− therefore excludes him from the dining−room and all thoseopportunities of higher education which he would have in MY house." Frequently one finds a description ofsome event, so vividly done that the mere reading of it seems like a real experience. An account ofTennyson's burial in Westminster is a typical bit of description:−−

Bright sunshine streamed through the windows of the nave, while the choir was in half gloom, and as eachshaft of light illuminated the flower−covered bier as it slowly travelled on, one thought of the brightsuccession of his works between the darkness before and the darkness after. I am glad to say that the RoyalSociety was represented by four of its chief officers, and nine of the commonalty, including myself.Tennyson has a right to that, as the first poet since Lucretius who has understood the drift of science.

No parts of the Life and Letters are more enjoyable than those concerning the "Happy Family," as a friend ofHuxley's names his household. His family of seven children found their father a most engaging friend andcompanion. He could tell them wonderful sea stories and animal stories and could draw fascinating pictures.His son writes of how when he was ill with scarlet fever he used to look forward to his father'shome−coming. "The solitary days−−for I was the first victim in the family−−were very long, and I lookedforward with intense interest to one half−hour after dinner, when he would come up and draw scenes fromthe history of a remarkable bull−terrier and his family that went to the seaside in a most human andchild−delighting manner. I have seldom suffered a greater disappointment than when, one evening, I fellasleep just before this fairy half−hour, and lost it out of my life."

The account of the comradeship between Huxley and his wife reads like a good old−time romance. He wasattracted to her at first by her "simplicity and directness united with an unusual degree of cultivation,"Huxley's son writes. On her he depended for advice in his work, and for companionship at home and abroadwhen wandering in search of health in Italy and Switzerland. When he had been separated from her for sometime, he wrote, "Nobody, children or anyone else, can be to me what you are. Ulysses preferred his old


INTRODUCTION 6

woman to immortality, and this absence has led me to see that he was as wise in that as in other things."Again he writes, "Against all trouble (and I have had my share) I weigh a wife−comrade 'trew and fest' in allemergencies."

The letters also give one a clear idea of the breadth of Huxley's interests, particularly of his appreciation ofthe various forms of art. Huxley believed strongly in the arts as a refining and helpful influence in education.He keenly enjoyed good music. Professor Hewes writes of him that one breaking in upon him in theafternoon at South Kensington would not infrequently be met "with a snatch of some melody of Bach'sfugue." He also liked good pictures, and always had among his friends well−known artists, as Alma−Tadema,Sir Frederick Leighton, and Burne−Jones. He read poetry widely, and strongly advocated the teaching ofpoetry in English schools. As to poetry, his own preferences are interesting. Wordsworth he considered toodiscursive; Shelley was too diffuse; Keats, he liked for pure beauty, Browning for strength, and Tennyson forhis understanding of modern science; but most frequently of all he read Milton and Shakespeare.

As to Huxley's appearance, and as to the impression which his personality made upon others, the descriptionof a friend, Mr. G. W. Smalley, presents him with striking force. "The square forehead, the square jaw, thetense lines of the mouth, the deep flashing dark eyes, the impression of something more than strength he gaveyou, an impression of sincerity, of solid force, of immovability, yet with the gentleness arising from theserene consciousness of his strength−−all this belonged to Huxley and to him alone. The first glancemagnetized his audience. The eyes were those of one accustomed to command, of one having authority, andnot fearing on occasion to use it. The hair swept carelessly away from the broad forehead and grew ratherlong behind, yet the length did not suggest, as it often does, effeminacy. He was masculine ineverything−−look, gesture, speech. Sparing of gesture, sparing of emphasis, careless of mere rhetorical ororatorical art, he had nevertheless the secret of the highest art of all, whether in oratory or whatever else−−hehad simplicity."

Simplicity, directness, sincerity,−−all these qualities describe Huxley; but the one attribute whichdistinguishes him above all others is love of truth. A love of truth, as the phrase characterizes Huxley, wouldnecessarily produce a scholarly habit of mind. It was the zealous search for truth which determined hismethod of work. In science, Huxley would "take at second hand nothing for which he vouched in teaching."Some one reproached him for wasting time verifying what another had already done. "If that is his practice,"he commented, "his work will never live." The same motive made him a master of languages. To be able toread at first hand the writings of other nations, he learned German, French, Italian, and Greek. One of thechief reasons for learning to read Greek was to see for himself if Aristotle really did say that the heart hadonly three chambers−−an error, he discovered, not of Aristotle, but of the translator. It was, moreover, thescholar in Huxley which made him impatient of narrow, half−formed, foggy conclusions. His own work hasall the breadth and freedom and universality of the scholar, but it has, also, a quality equally distinctive of thescholar, namely, an infinite precision in the matter of detail.

If love of truth made Huxley a scholar, it made him, also, a courageous fighter. Man's first duty, as he saw it,was to seek the truth; his second was to teach it to others, and, if necessary, to contend valiantly for it. To failto teach what you honestly know to be true, because it may harm your reputation, or even because it may givepain to others, is cowardice. "I am not greatly concerned about any reputation," Huxley writes to his wife,"except that of being entirely honest and straightforward." Regardless of warnings that the publication ofMan's Place in Nature would ruin his career, Huxley passed on to others what nature had revealed to him. Hewas regardless, also, of the confusion and pain which his view would necessarily bring to those who had beennourished in old traditions. To stand with a man or two and to do battle with the world on the score of its oldbeliefs, has never been an easy task since the world began. Certainly it required fearlessness anddetermination to wrestle with the prejudices against science in the middle of the nineteenth century−−howmuch may be gathered from the reading of Darwin's Life and Letters. The attitude of the times towardscience has already been indicated. One may he allowed to give one more example from the reported address


INTRODUCTION 7

of a clergyman. "O ye men of science, ye men of science, leave us our ancestors in paradise, and you mayhave yours in Zoological gardens." The war was, for the most part, between the clergy and the men ofscience, but it is necessary to remember that Huxley fought not against Christianity, but against dogma; thathe fought not against the past,−−he had great reverence for the accomplishment of the past,−−but againstunwillingness to accept the new truth of the present.

A scholar of the highest type and a fearless defender of true and honest thinking, Huxley certainly was: butthe quality which gives meaning to his work, which makes it live, is a certain human quality due to the factthat Huxley was always keenly alive to the relation of science to the problems of life. For this reason, he wasnot content with the mere acquirement of knowledge; and for this reason, also, he could not quietly wait untilthe world should come to his way of thinking. Much of the time, therefore, which he would otherwisenaturally have spent in research, he spent in contending for and in endeavoring to popularize the facts ofscience. It was this desire to make his ideas prevail that led Huxley to work for a mastery of the technique ofspeaking and writing. He hated both, but taught himself to do both well. The end of all his infinite painsabout his writing was not because style for its own sake is worth while, but because he saw that the only wayto win men to a consideration of his message was to make it perfectly clear and attractive to them. Huxley'smessage to the people was that happiness, usefulness, and even material prosperity depend upon anunderstanding of the laws of nature. He also taught that a knowledge of the facts of science is the soundestbasis for moral law; that a clear sense of the penalties which Nature inflicts for disobedience of her laws musteventually be the greatest force for the purification of life. If he was to be remembered, therefore, he desiredthat he should be remembered primarily as one who had helped the people "to think truly and to live rightly."Huxley's writing is, then, something more than a scholarly exposition of abstruse matter; for it has beenfurther devoted to the increasing of man's capacity for usefulness, and to the betterment of his life here onearth.

II. SUBJECT−MATTER, STRUCTURE, AND STYLE

From the point of view of subject−matter, structure, and style, Huxley's essays are admirably adapted to theuses of the student in English. The themes of the essays are two, education and science. In these two subjectsHuxley earnestly sought to arouse interest and to impart knowledge, because he believed that intelligence inthese matters is essential for the advancement of the race in strength and morality. Both subjects, therefore,should be valuable to the student. In education, certainly, he should be interested, since it is his mainoccupation, if not his chief concern. Essays like A Liberal Education and The Principal Subjects of Educationmay suggest to him the meaning of all his work, and may suggest, also, the things which it would be well forhim to know; and, even more, a consideration of these subjects may arouse him to a greater interest andresponsibility than he usually assumes toward his own mental equipment. Of greater interest probably will bethe subjects which deal with nature; for the ways of nature are more nearly within the range of his realconcerns than are the wherefores of study. The story of the formation of a piece of chalk, the substance whichlies at the basis of all life, the habits of sea animals, are all subjects the nature of which is akin to his owneager interest in the world.

Undoubtedly the subjects about which Huxley writes will "appeal" to the student; but it is in analysis that thereal discipline lies. For analysis Huxley's essays are excellent. They illustrate "the clear power of exposition,"and such power is, as Huxley wrote to Tyndall, the one quality the people want,−−exposition "so clear thatthey may think they understand even if they don't." Huxley obtains that perfect clearness in his own work bysimple definition, by keeping steadily before his audience his intention, and by making plain throughout hislecture a well−defined organic structure. No X−ray machine is needful to make the skeleton visible; it standsforth with the parts all nicely related and compactly joined. In reference to structure, his son and biographerwrites, "He loved to visualize his object clearly. The framework of what he wished to say would always bedrawn out first." Professor Ray Lankester also mentions Huxley's love of form. "He deals with form not only


II. SUBJECT−MATTER, STRUCTURE, AND STYLE 8

as a mechanical engineer IN PARTIBUS (Huxley's own description of himself), but also as an artist, a bornlover of form, a character which others recognize in him though he does not himself set it down in hisanalysis." Huxley's own account of his efforts to shape his work is suggestive. "The fact is that I have a greatlove and respect for my native tongue, and take great pains to use it properly. Sometimes I write essayshalf−a−dozen times before I can get them into proper shape; and I believe I become more fastidious as I growolder." And, indeed, there is a marked difference in firmness of structure between the earlier essays, such asOn the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences, written, as Huxley acknowledges, in great haste,and the later essays, such as A Liberal Education and The Method of Scientific Investigation. To trace and todefine this difference will be most helpful to the student who is building up a knowledge of structure for hisown use.

According to Huxley's biographer in the Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, the essays whichrepresent him at his best are those published in 1868. They are A Piece of Chalk, A Liberal Education, andOn the Physical Basis of Life. In connection with the comment on these essays is the following quotationwhich gives one interesting information as to Huxley's method of obtaining a clear style:−−

This lecture on A Piece of Chalk together with two others delivered this year, seems to me to mark thematuring of his style into that mastery of clear expression for which he deliberately labored, the sayingexactly what he meant, neither too much nor too little, without confusion and without obscurity. Havesomething to say, and say it, was the Duke of Wellington's theory of style; Huxley's was to say that which hasto be said in such language that you can stand cross−examination on each word. Be clear, though you may beconvicted of error. If you are clearly wrong, you will run up against a fact sometime and get set right. If youshuffle with your subject, and study chiefly to use language which will give a loophole of escape either way,there is no hope for you.

This was the secret of his lucidity. In no one could Buffon's aphorism on style find a better illustration, Lestyle c'est l'homme meme. In him science and literature, too often divorced, were closely united; andliterature owes him a debt for importing into it so much of the highest scientific habit of mind; for showingthat truthfulness need not be bald, and that real power lies more in exact accuracy than in luxuriance ofdiction.

Huxley's own theory as to how clearness is to be obtained gets at the root of the matter. "For my part, Iventure to doubt the wisdom of attempting to mould one's style by any other process than that of striving afterthe clear and forcible expression of definite conceptions; in which process the Glassian precept, first catchyour definite conception, is probably the most difficult to obey."

Perfect clearness, above every other quality of style, certainly is characteristic of Huxley; but clearness alonedoes not make subject−matter literature. In addition to this quality, Huxley's writing wins the reader by theracy diction, the homely illustration, the plain, honest phrasing. All these and other qualities bring one into anintimate relationship with his subject. A man of vast technical learning, he is still so interested in the relationof his facts to the problems of men that he is always able to infuse life into the driest of subjects, in otherwords, to HUMANIZE his knowledge; and in the estimation of Matthew Arnold, this is the true work of thescholar, the highest mission of style.

III. SUGGESTED STUDIES IN SUBJECT−MATTER, STRUCTURE, ANDSTYLE

Although fully realizing that the questions here given are only such as are generally used everywhere byinstructors in English, the editor has, nevertheless, included them with the hope that some one may find themhelpful.


III. SUGGESTED STUDIES IN SUBJECT−MATTER, STRUCTURE, AND STYLE 9

The studies given include a few general questions and suggestions on subject−matter, structure, and style.The questions on structure are based on an analysis of the whole composition and of the paragraph; those onstyle are based on a study of sentences and words. Such a division of material may seem unwarranted; for, itmay be urged, firmness of structure depends, to a certain extent, upon sentence−form and words; andclearness of style, to a large extent, upon the form of the paragraph and whole composition. The two,certainly, cannot be in justice separated; and especially is it true, more deeply true than the average studentcan be brought to believe, that structure, "MIND, in style" as Pater phrases it, primarily determines not onlyclearness, but also such qualities of style as reserve, refinement, and simple Doric beauty. Since, however,structure is more obviously associated with the larger groups, and style with the smaller, the questions havebeen arranged according to this division.

I. Suggestions for the Study of Subject−Matter.

1. To whom does Huxley address the essay?

2. Can you see any adaptation of his material to his audience?

3. How would A Piece of Chalk be differently presented if given before a science club?

4. Does Huxley make his subject interesting? If so, how does he accomplish this?

5. Is the personality of Huxley suggested by the essays? See Life and Letters, vol. ii, p. 293.

II. Suggestions for the Study of Structure.

A. Analysis of the whole composition.

1. State in one complete sentence the theme of the essay.

2. Analyze the essay for the logical development of the thought.

a. Questions on the Introduction. In the introduction, how does the author approach his material? Does he give the main points of the essay? Does he give his reasons for writing? Does he narrow his subject to one point of view? Is the introduction a digression?

b. Questions on the Body. Can you find large groups of thought? Are these groups closely related to the theme and to each other? Do you find any digressions? Is the method used in developing the groups inductive or deductive? Is the method different in different groups? Are the groups arranged for good emphasis in the whole composition?

c. Questions on the Conclusion. How does the author conclude the essay? Does the conclusion sum up the points of the essay? Are any new points suggested? Is the thought of the whole essay stated? Do you consider it a strong conclusion?

3. Make out an outline which shall picture the skeleton of the essay studied. In making the outline express thetopics in the form of complete statements, phrase the thought for clear sequence, and be careful about such



matters as spacing and punctuation.

B. Analysis of paragraph structure.

1. Can a paragraph be analyzed in the same manner as the whole composition?

2. Can you express the thought of each paragraph in a complete sentence?

3. Can you find different points presented in the paragraph developing the paragraph topic, as the largegroups of the whole composition develop the theme?

4. Are the paragraphs closely related, and how are they bound together?

5. Can any of the paragraphs be combined to advantage?

6. Read from Barrett Wendell's English Composition the chapter on paragraphs. Are Huxley's paragraphsconstructed in accordance with the principles given in this chapter?

7. Is the paragraph type varied? For paragraph types, see Scott and Denny's Paragraph Writing.

C. Comparative study of the structure of the essay.

1. Do you find any difference between Huxley's earlier and later essays as regards the structure of the whole,or the structure of the paragraph?

2. Which essay seems to you to be most successful in structure?

3. Has the character of the audience any influence upon the structure of the essays?

4. Compare the structure of one of Huxley's essays with that of some other essay recently studied.

5. Has the nature of the material any influence upon the structure of the essay?

III. Suggestions for the Study of Style.

A. Exactly what do you mean by style?

B. Questions on sentence structure.

1. From any given essay, group together sentences which are long, short, loose, periodic, balanced, simple,compound; note those peculiar, for any reason, to Huxley.

2. Stevenson says, "The one rule is to be infinitely various; to interest, to disappoint, to surprise and still togratify; to be ever changing, as it were, the stitch, and yet still to give the effect of ingenious neatness."

Do Huxley's sentences conform to Stevenson's rule? Compare Huxley's sentences with Stevenson's forvariety in form. Is there any reason for the difference between the form of the two writers?

3. Does this quotation from Pater's essay on Style describe Huxley's sentences? "The blithe, crisp sentence,decisive as a child's expression of its needs, may alternate with the long− contending, victoriously intricatesentence; the sentence, born with the integrity of a single word, relieving the sort of sentence in which, if you



look closely, you can see contrivance, much adjustment, to bring a highly qualified matter into compass atone view."

4. How do Huxley's sentences compare with those of Ruskin, or with those of any author recently studied?

5. Are Huxley's sentences musical? How does an author make his sentences musical?

C. Questions on words.

1. Do you find evidence of exactness, a quality which Huxley said he labored for?

2. Are the words general or specific in character?

3. How does Huxley make his subject−matter attractive?

4. From what sources does Huxley derive his words? Are they every− day words, or more scholarly incharacter?

5. Do you find any figures? Are these mainly ornamental or do they re−enforce the thought?

8. Are there many allusions and quotations? Can you easily recognize the source?

7. Pater says in his essay on Style that the literary artist "begets a vocabulary faithful to the colouring of hisown spirit, and in the strictest sense original." Do you find that Huxley's vocabulary suggests the man?

8. Does Huxley seem to search for "the smooth, or winsome, or forcible word, as such, or quite simply andhonestly, for the word's adjustment to its meaning"?

9. Make out a list of the words and proper names in any given essay which are not familiar to you; write outthe explanation of these in the form of notes giving any information which is interesting and relevant.

D. General questions on style.

1. How is Huxley's style adapted to the subject−matter?

2. Can you explain the difference in style of the different essays by the difference in purpose?

3. Compare Huxley's way of saying things with some other author's way of saying things.

4. Huxley says of his essays to workingmen, "I only wish I had had the sense to anticipate the run these havehad here and abroad, and I would have revised them properly. As they stand they are terribily in the rough,from a literary point of view."

Do you find evidences of roughness?

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

And when I consider, in one view, the many things . . . which I have upon my hands, I feel the burlesque ofbeing employed in this manner at my time of life. But, in another view, and taking in all circumstances, thesethings, as trifling as they may appear, no less than things of greater importance, seem to be put upon me to


AUTOBIOGRAPHY 12

do.−−Bishop Butler to the Duchess of Somerset.

The "many things" to which the Duchess's correspondent here refers are the repairs and improvements of theepiscopal seat at Auckland. I doubt if the great apologist, greater in nothing than in the simple dignity of hischaracter, would have considered the writing an account of himself as a thing which could be put upon him todo whatever circumstances might be taken in. But the good bishop lived in an age when a man might writebooks and yet be permitted to keep his private existence to himself; in the pre−Boswellian epoch, when thegerm of the photographer lay concealed in the distant future, and the interviewer who pervades our age wasan unforeseen, indeed unimaginable, birth of time.

At present, the most convinced believer in the aphorism "Bene qui latuit, bene vixit," is not always able to actup to it. An importunate person informs him that his portrait is about to be published and will beaccompanied by a biography which the importunate person proposes to write. The sufferer knows what thatmeans; either he undertakes to revise the "biography" or he does not. In the former case, he makes himselfresponsible; in the latter, he allows the publication of a mass of more or less fulsome inaccuracies for whichhe will be held responsible by those who are familiar with the prevalent art of self−advertisement. On thewhole, it may be better to get over the "burlesque of being employed in this manner" and do the thinghimself.

It was by reflections of this kind that, some years ago, I was led to write and permit the publication of thesubjoined sketch.

I was born about eight o'clock in the morning on the 4th of May, 1825, at Ealing, which was, at that time, asquiet a little country village as could be found within a half−a−dozen miles of Hyde Park Corner. Now it is asuburb of London with, I believe, 30,000 inhabitants. My father was one of the masters in a large semi−public school which at one time had a high reputation. I am not aware that any portents preceded my arrivalin this world, but, in my childhood, I remember hearing a traditional account of the manner in which I lost thechance of an endowment of great practical value. The windows of my mother's room were open, inconsequence of the unusual warmth of the weather. For the same reason, probably, a neighbouring beehivehad swarmed, and the new colony, pitching on the window−sill, was making its way into the room when thehorrified nurse shut down the sash. If that well− meaning woman had only abstained from her ill−timedinterference, the swarm might have settled on my lips, and I should have been endowed with that mellifluouseloquence which, in this country, leads far more surely than worth, capacity, or honest work, to the highestplaces in Church and State. But the opportunity was lost, and I have been obliged to content myself throughlife with saying what I mean in the plainest of plain language, than which, I suppose, there is no habit moreruinous to a man's prospects of advancement.

Why I was christened Thomas Henry I do not know; but it is a curious chance that my parents should havefixed for my usual denomination upon the name of that particular Apostle with whom I have always felt mostsympathy. Physically and mentally I am the son of my mother so completely−−even down to peculiarmovements of the hands, which made their appearance in me as I reached the age she had when I noticedthem−−that I can hardly find any trace of my father in myself, except an inborn faculty for drawing, whichunfortunately, in my case, has never been cultivated, a hot temper, and that amount of tenacity of purposewhich unfriendly observers sometimes call obstinacy.

My mother was a slender brunette, of an emotional and energetic temperament, and possessed of the mostpiercing black eyes I ever saw in a woman's head. With no more education than other women of the middleclasses in her day, she had an excellent mental capacity. Her most distinguishing characteristic, however, wasrapidity of thought. If one ventured to suggest she had not taken much time to arrive at any conclusion, shewould say, "I cannot help it, things flash across me." That peculiarity has been passed on to me in fullstrength; it has often stood me in good stead; it has sometimes played me sad tricks, and it has always been a


AUTOBIOGRAPHY 13

danger. But, after all, if my time were to come over again, there is nothing I would less willingly part withthan my inheritance of mother wit.

I have next to nothing to say about my childhood. In later years my mother, looking at me almostreproachfully, would sometimes say, "Ah! you were such a pretty boy!" whence I had no difficulty inconcluding that I had not fulfilled my early promise in the matter of looks. In fact, I have a distinctrecollection of certain curls of which I was vain, and of a conviction that I closely resembled that handsome,courtly gentleman, Sir Herbert Oakley, who was vicar of our parish, and who was as a god to us country folk,because he was occasionally visited by the then Prince George of Cambridge. I remember turning mypinafore wrong side forwards in order to represent a surplice, and preaching to my mother's maids in thekitchen as nearly as possible in Sir Herbert's manner one Sunday morning when the rest of the family were atchurch. That is the earliest indication I can call to mind of the strong clerical affinities which my friend Mr.Herbert Spencer has always ascribed to me, though I fancy they have for the most part remained in a latentstate.

My regular school training was of the briefest, perhaps fortunately, for though my way of life has made meacquainted with all sorts and conditions of men, from the highest to the lowest, I deliberately affirm that thesociety I fell into at school was the worst I have ever known. We boys were average lads, with much the sameinherent capacity for good and evil as any others; but the people who were set over us cared about as muchfor our intellectual and moral welfare as if they were baby−farmers. We were left to the operation of thestruggle for existence among ourselves, and bullying was the least of the ill practices current among us.Almost the only cheerful reminiscence in connection with the place which arises in my mind is that of a battleI had with one of my classmates, who had bullied me until I could stand it no longer. I was a very slight lad,but there was a wild−cat element in me which, when roused, made up for lack of weight, and I licked myadversary effectually. However, one of my first experiences of the extremely rough−and−ready nature ofjustice, as exhibited by the course of things in general, arose out of the fact that I−−the victor−−had a blackeye, while he−−the vanquished−−had none, so that I got into disgrace and he did not. We made it up, andthereafter I was unmolested. One of the greatest shocks I ever received in my life was to be told a dozen yearsafterwards by the groom who brought me my horse in a stable−yard in Sydney that he was my quondamantagonist. He had a long story of family misfortune to account for his position, but at that time it wasnecessary to deal very cautiously with mysterious strangers in New South Wales, and on inquiry I found thatthe unfortunate young man had not only been "sent out," but had undergone more than one colonialconviction.

As I grew older, my great desire was to be a mechanical engineer, but the fates were against this and, whilevery young, I commenced the study of medicine under a medical brother−in−law. But, though the Institute ofMechanical Engineers would certainly not own me, I am not sure that I have not all along been a sort ofmechanical engineer in partibus infidelium. I am now occasionally horrified to think how very little I everknew or cared about medicine as the art of healing. The only part of my professional course which really anddeeply interested me was physiology, which is the mechanical engineering of living machines; and,notwithstanding that natural science has been my proper business, I am afraid there is very little of thegenuine naturalist in me. I never collected anything, and species work was always a burden to me; what Icared for was the architectural and engineering part of the business, the working out of the wonderful unity ofplan in the thousands and thousands of diverse living constructions, and the modifications of similarapparatuses to serve diverse ends. The extraordinary attraction I felt towards the study of the intricacies ofliving structure nearly proved fatal to me at the outset. I was a mere boy−−I think between thirteen andfourteen years of age−−when I was taken by some older student friends of mine to the first post− mortemexamination I ever attended. All my life I have been most unfortunately sensitive to the disagreeables whichattend anatomical pursuits, but on this occasion my curiosity overpowered all other feelings, and I spent twoor three hours in gratifying it. I did not cut myself, and none of the ordinary symptoms of dissection−poisonsupervened, but poisoned I was somehow, and I remember sinking into a strange state of apathy. By way of a


AUTOBIOGRAPHY 14

last chance, I was sent to the care of some good, kind people, friends of my father's, who lived in a farmhousein the heart of Warwickshire. I remember staggering from my bed to the window on the bright springmorning after my arrival, and throwing open the casement. Life seemed to come back on the wings of thebreeze, and to this day the faint odor of wood−smoke, like that which floated across the farm−yard in theearly morning, is as good to me as the "sweet south upon a bed of violets." I soon recovered, but for years Isuffered from occasional paroxysms of internal pain, and from that time my constant friend, hypochondriacaldyspepsia, commenced his half century of co−tenancy of my fleshly tabernacle.

Looking back on my "Lehrjahre," I am sorry to say that I do not think that any account of my doings as astudent would tend to edification. In fact, I should distinctly warn ingenuous youth to avoid imitating myexample. I worked extremely hard when it pleased me, and when it did not−−which was a very frequentcase−−I was extremely idle (unless making caricatures of one's pastors and masters is to be called a branch ofindustry), or else wasted my energies in wrong directions. I read everything I could lay hands upon, includingnovels, and took up all sorts of pursuits to drop them again quite as speedily. No doubt it was very largely myown fault, but the only instruction from which I ever obtained the proper effect of education was that which Ireceived from Mr. Wharton Jones, who was the lecturer on physiology at the Charing Cross School ofMedicine. The extent and precision of his knowledge impressed me greatly, and the severe exactness of hismethod of lecturing was quite to my taste. I do not know that I have ever felt so much respect for anybody asa teacher before or since. I worked hard to obtain his approbation, and he was extremely kind and helpful tothe youngster who, I am afraid, took up more of his time than he had any right to do. It was he who suggestedthe publication of my first scientific paper−−a very little one−−in the Medical Gazette of 1845, and mostkindly corrected the literary faults which abounded in it, short as it was; for at that time, and for many yearsafterwards, I detested the trouble of writing, and would take no pains over it.

It was in the early spring of 1846, that, having finished my obligatory medical studies and passed the first M.D. examination at the London University,−−though I was still too young to qualify at the College ofSurgeons,−−I was talking to a fellow−student (the present eminent physician, Sir Joseph Fayrer), andwondering what I should do to meet the imperative necessity for earning my own bread, when my friendsuggested that I should write to Sir William Burnett, at that time Director−General for the Medical Service ofthe Navy, for an appointment. I thought this rather a strong thing to do, as Sir William was personallyunknown to me, but my cheery friend would not listen to my scruples, so I went to my lodgings and wrote thebest letter I could devise. A few days afterwards I received the usual official circular acknowledgment, but atthe bottom there was written an instruction to call at Somerset House on such a day. I thought that looked likebusiness, so at the appointed time I called and sent in my card, while I waited in Sir William's ante−room. Hewas a tall, shrewd−looking old gentleman, with a broad Scotch accent−−and I think I see him now as heentered with my card in his hand. The first thing he did was to return it, with the frugal reminder that I shouldprobably find it useful on some other occasion. The second was to ask whether I was an Irishman. I supposethe air of modesty about my appeal must have struck him. I satisfied the Director−General that I was Englishto the backbone, and he made some inquiries as to my student career, finally desiring me to hold myself readyfor examination. Having passed this, I was in Her Majesty's Service, and entered on the books of Nelson's oldship, the Victory, for duty at Haslar Hospital, about a couple of months after I made my application.

My official chief at Haslar was a very remarkable person, the late Sir John Richardson, an excellentnaturalist, and far−famed as an indomitable Arctic traveller. He was a silent, reserved man, outside the circleof his family and intimates; and, having a full share of youthful vanity, I was extremely disgusted to find that"Old John," as we irreverent youngsters called him, took not the slightest notice of my worshipful self eitherthe first time I attended him, as it was my duty to do, or for some weeks afterwards. I am afraid to think of thelengths to which my tongue may have run on the subject of the churlishness of the chief, who was, in truth,one of the kindest−hearted and most considerate of men. But one day, as I was crossing the hospital square,Sir John stopped me, and heaped coals of fire on my head by telling me that he had tried to get me one of theresident appointments, much coveted by the assistant surgeons, but that the Admiralty had put in another


AUTOBIOGRAPHY 15

man. "However," said he, "I mean to keep you here till I can get you something you will like," and turnedupon his heel without waiting for the thanks I stammered out. That explained how it was I had not beenpacked off to the West Coast of Africa like some of my juniors, and why, eventually, I remained altogetherseven months at Haslar.

After a long interval, during which "Old John" ignored my existence almost as completely as before, hestopped me again as we met in a casual way, and describing the service on which the Rattlesnake was likelyto be employed, said that Captain Owen Stanley, who was to command the ship, had asked him torecommend an assistant surgeon who knew something of science; would I like that? Of course I jumped atthe offer. "Very well, I give you leave; go to London at once and see Captain Stanley." I went, saw my futurecommander, who was very civil to me, and promised to ask that I should be appointed to his ship, as in duetime I was. It is a singular thing that, during the few months of my stay at Haslar, I had among my messmatestwo future Directors−General of the Medical Service of the Navy (Sir Alexander Armstrong and Sir JohnWatt−Reid), with the present President of the College of Physicians and my kindest of doctors, Sir AndrewClark.

Life on board Her Majesty's ship in those days was a very different affair from what it is now, and ours wasexceptionally rough, as we were often many months without receiving letters or seeing any civilised peoplebut ourselves. In exchange, we had the interest of being about the last voyagers, I suppose, to whom it couldbe possible to meet with people who knew nothing of fire−arms−−as we did on the south coast of NewGuinea−−and of making acquaintance with a variety of interesting savage and semi−civilised people. But,apart from experience of this kind and the opportunities offered for scientific work, to me, personally, thecruise was extremely valuable. It was good for me to live under sharp discipline; to be down on the realitiesof existence by living on bare necessaries; to find out how extremely well worth living life seemed to bewhen one woke up from a night's rest on a soft plank, with the sky for canopy and cocoa and weevilly biscuitthe sole prospect for breakfast; and, more especially, to learn to work for the sake of what I got for myself outof it, even if it all went to the bottom and I along with it. My brother officers were as good fellows as sailorsought to be and generally are, but, naturally, they neither knew nor cared anything about my pursuits, norunderstood why I should be so zealous in pursuit of the objects which my friends, the middies, christened"Buffons," after the title conspicuous on a volume of the Suites a Buffon, which stood on my shelf in thechart room.

During the four years of our absence, I sent home communication after communication to the "LinneanSociety," with the same result as that obtained by Noah when he sent the raven out of his ark. Tired at last ofhearing nothing about them, I determined to do or die, and in 1849 I drew up a more elaborate paper andforwarded it to the Royal Society. This was my dove, if I had only known it. But owing to the movements ofthe ship, I heard nothing of that either until my return to England in the latter end of the year 1850, when Ifound that it was printed and published, and that a huge packet of separate copies awaited me. When I hearsome of my young friends complain of want of sympathy and encouragement, I am inclined to think that mynaval life was not the least valuable part of my education.

Three years after my return were occupied by a battle between my scientific friends on the one hand and theAdmiralty on the other, as to whether the latter ought, or ought not, to act up to the spirit of a pledge they hadgiven to encourage officers who had done scientific work by contributing to the expense of publishing mine.At last the Admiralty, getting tired, I suppose, cut short the discussion by ordering me to join a ship, whichthing I declined to do, and as Rastignac, in the Pere Goriot says to Paris, I said to London "a nous deux." Idesired to obtain a Professorship of either Physiology or Comparative Anatomy, and as vacancies occurred Iapplied, but in vain. My friend, Professor Tyndall, and I were candidates at the same time, he for the Chair ofPhysics and I for that of Natural History in the University of Toronto, which, fortunately, as it turned out,would not look at either of us. I say fortunately, not from any lack of respect for Toronto, but because I soonmade up my mind that London was the place for me, and hence I have steadily declined the inducements to


AUTOBIOGRAPHY 16

leave it, which have at various times been offered. At last, in 1854, on the translation of my warm friendEdward Forbes, to Edinburgh, Sir Henry de la Beche, the Director−General of the Geological Survey, offeredme the post Forbes vacated of Paleontologist and Lecturer on Natural History. I refused the former pointblank, and accepted the latter only provisionally, telling Sir Henry that I did not care for fossils, and that Ishould give up Natural History as soon as I could get a physiological post. But I held the office for thirty−oneyears, and a large part of my work has been paleontological.

At that time I disliked public speaking, and had a firm conviction that I should break down every time Iopened my mouth. I believe I had every fault a speaker could have (except talking at random or indulging inrhetoric), when I spoke to the first important audience I ever addressed, on a Friday evening at the RoyalInstitution, in 1852. Yet, I must confess to having been guilty, malgre moi, of as much public speaking asmost of my contemporaries, and for the last ten years it ceased to be so much of a bugbear to me. I used topity myself for having to go through this training, but I am now more disposed to compassionate theunfortunate audiences, especially my ever friendly hearers at the Royal Institution, who were the subjects ofmy oratorical experiments.

The last thing that it would be proper for me to do would be to speak of the work of my life, or to say at theend of the day whether I think I have earned my wages or not. Men are said to be partial judges ofthemselves. Young men may be, I doubt if old men are. Life seems terribly foreshortened as they look backand the mountain they set themselves to climb in youth turns out to be a mere spur of immeasurably higherranges when, by failing breath, they reach the top. But if I may speak of the objects I have had more or lessdefinitely in view since I began the ascent of my hillock, they are briefly these: To promote the increase ofnatural knowledge and to forward the application of scientific methods of investigation to all the problems oflife to the best of my ability, in the conviction which has grown with my growth and strengthened with mystrength, that there is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action,and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make− believe by which pious hands havehidden its uglier features is stripped off.

It is with this intent that I have subordinated any reasonable, or unreasonable, ambition for scientific famewhich I may have permitted myself to entertain to other ends; to the popularization of science; to thedevelopment and organisation of scientific education; to the endless series of battles and skirmishes overevolution; and to untiring opposition to that ecclesiastical spirit, that clericalism, which in England, aseverywhere else, and to whatever denomination it may belong, is the deadly enemy of science.

In striving for the attainment of these objects, I have been but one among many, and I shall be well content tobe remembered, or even not remembered, as such. Circumstances, among which I am proud to reckon thedevoted kindness of many friends, have led to my occupation of various prominent positions, among whichthe Presidency of the Royal Society is the highest. It would be mock modesty on my part, with these andother scientific honours which have been bestowed upon me, to pretend that I have not succeeded in thecareer which I have followed, rather because I was driven into it than of my own free will; but I am afraid Ishould not count even these things as marks of success if I could not hope that I had somewhat helped thatmovement of opinion which has been called the New Reformation.

ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE

This time two hundred years ago−−in the beginning of January, 1666−− those of our forefathers whoinhabited this great and ancient city, took breath between the shocks of two fearful calamities: one not quitepast, although its fury had abated; the other to come.

Within a few yards of the very spot on which we are assembled, so the tradition runs, that painful and deadly


ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 17

malady, the plague, appeared in the latter months of 1664; and, though no new visitor, smote the people ofEngland, and especially of her capital, with a violence unknown before, in the course of the following year.The hand of a master has pictured what happened in those dismal months; and in that truest of fictions, TheHistory of the Plague Year, Defoe shows death, with every accompaniment of pain and terror, stalkingthrough the narrow streets of old London, and changing their busy hum into a silence broken only by thewailing of the mourners of fifty thousand dead; by the woful denunciations and mad prayers of fanatics; andby the madder yells of despairing profligates.

But, about this time in 1666, the death−rate had sunk to nearly its ordinary amount; a case of plague occurredonly here and there, and the richer citizens who had flown from the pest had returned to their dwellings. Theremnant of the people began to toil at the accustomed round of duty, or of pleasure; and the stream of city lifebid fair to flow back along its old bed, with renewed and uninterrupted vigour.

The newly kindled hope was deceitful. The great plague, indeed, returned no more; but what it had done forthe Londoners, the great fire, which broke out in the autumn of 1666, did for London; and, in September ofthat year, a heap of ashes and the indestructible energy of the people were all that remained of the glory offive− sixths of the city within the walls.

Our forefathers had their own ways of accounting for each of these calamities. They submitted to the plaguein humility and in penitence, for they believed it to be the judgment of God. But, towards the fire they werefuriously indignant, interpreting it as the effect of the malice of man,−−as the work of the Republicans, or ofthe Papists, according as their prepossessions ran in favour of loyalty or of Puritanism.

It would, I fancy, have fared but ill with one who, standing where I now stand, in what was then a thicklypeopled and fashionable part of London, should have broached to our ancestors the doctrine which I nowpropound to you−−that all their hypotheses were alike wrong; that the plague was no more, in their sense,Divine judgment, than the fire was the work of any political, or of any religious sect; but that they werethemselves the authors of both plague and fire, and that they must look to themselves to prevent therecurrence of calamities, to all appearance so peculiarly beyond the reach of human control−−so evidently theresult of the wrath of God, or of the craft and subtlety of an enemy.

And one may picture to one's self how harmoniously the holy cursing of the Puritan of that day would havechimed in with the unholy cursing and the crackling wit of the Rochesters and Sedleys, and with the revilingsof the political fanatics, if my imaginary plain dealer had gone on to say that, if the return of such misfortuneswere ever rendered impossible, it would not be in virtue of the victory of the faith of Laud, or of that ofMilton; and, as little, by the triumph of republicanism, as by that of monarchy. But that the one thing needfulfor compassing this end was, that the people of England should second the efforts of an insignificantcorporation, the establishment of which, a few years before the epoch of the great plague and the great fire,had been as little noticed, as they were conspicuous.

Some twenty years before the outbreak of the plague a few calm and thoughtful students banded themselvestogether for the purpose, as they phrased it, of "improving natural knowledge." The ends they proposed toattain cannot be stated more clearly than in the words of one of the founders of the organisation:−−

"Our business was (precluding matters of theology and state affairs) to discourse and consider ofphilosophical enquiries, and such as related thereunto:−−as Physick, Anatomy, Geometry, Astronomy,Navigation, Staticks, Magneticks, Chymicks, Mechanicks, and Natural Experiments; with the state of thesestudies and their cultivation at home and abroad. We then discoursed of the circulation of the blood, thevalves in the veins, the venae lacteae, the lymphatic vessels, the Copernican hypothesis, the nature of cometsand new stars, the satellites of Jupiter, the oval shape (as it then appeared) of Saturn, the spots on the sun andits turning on its own axis, the inequalities and selenography of the moon, the several phases of Venus and



Mercury, the improvement of telescopes and grinding of glasses for that purpose, the weight of air, thepossibility or impossibility of vacuities and nature's abhorrence thereof, the Torricellian experiment inquicksilver, the descent of heavy bodies and the degree of acceleration therein, with divers other things oflike nature, some of which were then but new discoveries, and others not so generally known and embracedas now they are; with other things appertaining to what hath been called the New Philosophy, which from thetimes of Galileo at Florence, and Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam) in England, hath been much cultivated inItaly, France, Germany, and other parts abroad, as well as with us in England."

The learned Dr. Wallis, writing in 1696, narrates in these words, what happened half a century before, orabout 1645. The associates met at Oxford, in the rooms of Dr. Wilkins, who was destined to become abishop; and subsequently coming together in London, they attracted the notice of the king. And it is a strangeevidence of the taste for knowledge which the most obviously worthless of the Stuarts shared with his fatherand grandfather, that Charles the Second was not content with saying witty things about his philosophers, butdid wise things with regard to them. For he not only bestowed upon them such attention as he could sparefrom his poodles and his mistresses, but, being in his usual state of impecuniosity, begged for them of theDuke of Ormond; and, that step being without effect, gave them Chelsea College, a charter, and a mace:crowning his favours in the best way they could be crowned, by burdening them no further with royalpatronage or state interference.

Thus it was that the half−dozen young men, studious of the "New Philosophy," who met in one another'slodgings in Oxford or in London, in the middle of the seventeenth century, grew in numerical and in realstrength, until, in its latter part, the "Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge" had alreadybecome famous, and had acquired a claim upon the veneration of Englishmen, which it has ever sinceretained, as the principal focus of scientific activity in our islands, and the chief champion of the cause it wasformed to support.

It was by the aid of the Royal Society that Newton published his Principia. If all the books in the world,except the Philosophical Transactions, were destroyed, it is safe to say that the foundations of physicalscience would remain unshaken, and that the vast intellectual progress of the last two centuries would belargely, though incompletely, recorded. Nor have any signs of halting or of decrepitude manifestedthemselves in our own times. As in Dr. Wallis's days, so in these, "our business is, precluding theology andstate affairs, to discourse and consider of philosophical enquiries." But our "Mathematick" is one whichNewton would have to go to school to learn; our "Staticks, Mechanicks, Magneticks, Chymicks, and NaturalExperiments" constitute a mass of physical and chemical knowledge, a glimpse at which would compensateGalileo for the doings of a score of inquisitorial cardinals; our "Physick" and "Anatomy" have embraced suchinfinite varieties of beings, have laid open such new worlds in time and space, have grappled, notunsuccessfully, with such complex problems, that the eyes of Vesalius and of Harvey might be dazzled by thesight of the tree that has grown out of their grain of mustard seed.

The fact is perhaps rather too much, than too little, forced upon one's notice, nowadays, that all thismarvellous intellectual growth has a no less wonderful expression in practical life; and that, in this respect, ifin no other, the movement symbolised by the progress of the Royal Society stands without a parallel in thehistory of mankind.

A series of volumes as bulky as the "Transactions of the Royal Society" might possibly be filled with thesubtle speculations of the Schoolmen; not improbably, the obtaining a mastery over the products ofmediaeval thought might necessitate an even greater expenditure of time and of energy than the acquirementof the "New Philosophy"; but though such work engrossed the best intellects of Europe for a longer time thanhas elapsed since the great fire, its effects were "writ in water," so far as our social state is concerned.



On the other hand, if the noble first President of the Royal Society could revisit the upper air and once moregladden his eyes with a sight of the familiar mace, he would find himself in the midst of a materialcivilisation more different from that of his day, than that of the seventeenth was from that of the first century.And if Lord Brouncker's native sagacity had not deserted his ghost, he would need no long reflection todiscover that all these great ships, these railways, these telegraphs, these factories, these printing−presses,without which the whole fabric of modern English society would collapse into a mass of stagnant andstarving pauperism,−−that all these pillars of our State are but the ripples and the bubbles upon the surface ofthat great spiritual stream, the springs of which only, he and his fellows were privileged to see; and seeing, torecognise as that which it behoved them above all things to keep pure and undefiled.

It may not be too great a flight of imagination to conceive our noble revenant not forgetful of the greattroubles of his own day, and anxious to know how often London had been burned down since his time andhow often the plague had carried off its thousands. He would have to learn that, although London containstenfold the inflammable matter that it did in 1666; though, not content with filling our rooms with woodworkand light draperies, we must needs lead inflammable and explosive gases into every corner of our streets andhouses, we never allow even a street to burn down. And if he asked how this had come about, we should haveto explain that the improvement of natural knowledge has furnished us with dozens of machines for throwingwater upon fires, any one of which would have furnished the ingenious Mr. Hooke, the first "curator andexperimenter" of the Royal Society, with ample materials for discourse before half a dozen meetings of thatbody; and that, to say truth, except for the progress of natural knowledge, we should not have been able tomake even the tools by which these machines are constructed. And, further, it would be necessary to add, thatalthough severe fires sometimes occur and inflict great damage, the loss is very generally compensated bysocieties, the operations of which have been rendered possible only by the progress of natural knowledge inthe direction of mathematics, and the accumulation of wealth in virtue of other natural knowledge.

But the plague? My Lord Brouncker's observation would not, I fear, lead him to think that Englishmen of thenineteenth century are purer in life, or more fervent in religious faith, than the generation which couldproduce a Boyle, an Evelyn, and a Milton. He might find the mud of society at the bottom, instead of at thetop, but I fear that the sum total would be as deserving of swift judgment as at the time of the Restoration.And it would be our duty to explain once more, and this time not without shame, that we have no reason tobelieve that it is the improvement of our faith, nor that of our morals, which keeps the plague from our city;but, again, that it is the improvement of our natural knowledge.

We have learned that pestilences will only take up their abode among those who have prepared unswept andungarnished residences for them. Their cities must have narrow, unwatered streets, foul with accumulatedgarbage. Their houses must be ill−drained, ill− lighted, ill−ventilated. Their subjects must be ill−washed, ill−fed, ill−clothed. The London of 1665 was such a city. The cities of the East, where plague has an enduringdwelling, are such cities. We, in later times, have learned somewhat of Nature, and partly obey her. Becauseof this partial improvement of our natural knowledge and of that fractional obedience, we have no plague;because that knowledge is still very imperfect and that obedience yet incomplete, typhoid is our companionand cholera our visitor. But it is not presumptuous to express the belief that, when our knowledge is morecomplete and our obedience the expression of our knowledge, London will count her centuries of freedomfrom typhoid and cholera, as she now gratefully reckons her two hundred years of ignorance of that plaguewhich swooped upon her thrice in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Surely, there is nothing in these explanations which is not fully borne out by the facts? Surely, the principlesinvolved in them are now admitted among the fixed beliefs of all thinking men? Surely, it is true that ourcountrymen are less subject to fire, famine, pestilence, and all the evils which result from a want of commandover and due anticipation of the course of Nature, than were the countrymen of Milton; and health, wealth,and well−being are more abundant with us than with them? But no less certainly is the difference due to theimprovement of our knowledge of Nature, and the extent to which that improved knowledge has been



incorporated with the household words of men, and has supplied the springs of their daily actions.

Granting for a moment, then, the truth of that which the depreciators of natural knowledge are so fond ofurging, that its improvement can only add to the resources of our material civilisation; admitting it to bepossible that the founders of the Royal Society themselves looked for not other reward than this, I cannotconfess that I was guilty of exaggeration when I hinted, that to him who had the gift of distinguishingbetween prominent events and important events, the origin of a combined effort on the part of mankind toimprove natural knowledge might have loomed larger than the Plague and have outshone the glare of theFire; as a something fraught with a wealth of beneficence to mankind, in comparison with which the damagedone by those ghastly evils would shrink into insignificance.

It is very certain that for every victim slain by the plague, hundreds of mankind exist and find a fair share ofhappiness in the world by the aid of the spinning jenny. And the great fire, at its worst, could not have burnedthe supply of coal, the daily working of which, in the bowels of the earth, made possible by the steam pump,gives rise to an amount of wealth to which the millions lost in old London are but as an old song.

But spinning jenny and steam pump are, after all, but toys, possessing an accidental value; and naturalknowledge creates multitudes of more subtle contrivances, the praises of which do not happen to be sungbecause they are not directly convertible into instruments for creating wealth. When I contemplate naturalknowledge squandering such gifts among men, the only appropriate comparison I can find for her is to likenher to such a peasant woman as one sees in the Alps, striding ever upward, heavily burdened, and with mindbent only on her home; but yet without effort and without thought, knitting for her children. Now stockingsare good and comfortable things, and the children will undoubtedly be much the better for them; but surely itwould be short−sighted, to say the least of it, to depreciate this toiling mother as a merestocking−machine−−a mere provider of physical comforts?

However, there are blind leaders of the blind, and not a few of them, who take this view of naturalknowledge, and can see nothing in the bountiful mother of humanity but a sort of comfort−grinding machine.According to them, the improvement of natural knowledge always has been, and always must be,synonymous with no more than the improvement of the material resources and the increase of thegratifications of men.

Natural knowledge is, in their eyes, no real mother of mankind, bringing them up with kindness, and, if needbe, with sternness, in the way they should go, and instructing them in all things needful for their welfare; buta sort of fairy god−mother, ready to furnish her pets with shoes of swiftness, swords of sharpness, andomnipotent Aladdin's lamps, so that they may have telegraphs to Saturn, and see the other side of the moon,and thank God they are better than their benighted ancestors.

If this talk were true, I, for one, should not greatly care to toil in the service of natural knowledge. I think Iwould just as soon be quietly chipping my own flint axe, after the manner of my forefathers a few thousandyears back, as be troubled with the endless malady of thought which now infests us all, for such reward. But Iventure to say that such views are contrary alike to reason and to fact. Those who discourse in such fashionseem to me to be so intent upon trying to see what is above Nature, or what is behind her, that they are blindto what stares them in the face in her.

I should not venture thus to speak strongly if my justification were not to be found in the simplest and mostobvious facts,−−if it needed more than an appeal to the most notorious truths to justify my assertion, that theimprovement of natural knowledge, whatever direction it has taken, and however low the aims of those whomay have commenced it−−has not only conferred practical benefits on men, but, in so doing, has effected arevolution in their conceptions of the universe and of themselves, and has profoundly altered their modes ofthinking and their views of right and wrong. I say that natural knowledge, seeking to satisfy natural wants,



has found the ideas which can alone still spiritual cravings. I say that natural knowledge, in desiring toascertain the laws of comfort, has been driven to discover those of conduct, and to lay the foundations of anew morality.

Let us take these points separately; and first, what great ideas has natural knowledge introduced into men'sminds?

I cannot but think that the foundations of all natural knowledge were laid when the reason of man first cameface to face with the facts of Nature; when the savage first learned that the fingers of one hand are fewer thanthose of both; that it is shorter to cross a stream than to head it; that a stone stops where it is unless it bemoved, and that it drops from the hand which lets it go; that light and heat come and go with the sun; thatsticks burn away in a fire; that plants and animals grow and die; that if he struck his fellow savage a blow hewould make him angry, and perhaps get a blow in return, while if he offered him a fruit he would please him,and perhaps receive a fish in exchange. When men had acquired this much knowledge, the outlines, rudethough they were, of mathematics, of physics, of chemistry, of biology, of moral, economical, and politicalscience, were sketched. Nor did the germ of religion fail when science began to bud. Listen to words which,though new, are yet three thousand years old:−−

. . . When in heaven the stars about the moonLook beautiful, when all the winds are laid,And every height comes out, and jutting peakAnd valley, and the immeasurable heavensBreak open to their highest, and all the starsShine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart.

If the half savage Greek could share our feelings thus far, it is irrational to doubt that he went further, to findas we do, that upon that brief gladness there follows a certain sorrow,−−the little light of awakened humanintelligence shines so mere a spark amidst the abyss of the unknown and unknowable; seems so insufficientto do more than illuminate the imperfections that cannot be remedied, the aspirations that cannot be realised,of man's own nature. But in this sadness, this consciousness of the limitation of man, this sense of an opensecret which he cannot penetrate, lies the essence of all religion; and the attempt to embody it in the formsfurnished by the intellect is the origin of the higher theologies.

Thus it seems impossible to imagine but that the foundations of all knowledge−−secular or sacred−−were laidwhen intelligence dawned, though the superstructure remained for long ages so slight and feeble as to becompatible with the existence of almost any general view respecting the mode of governance of the universe.No doubt, from the first, there were certain phenomena which, to the rudest mind, presented a constancy ofoccurrence, and suggested that a fixed order ruled, at any rate, among them. I doubt if the grossest of Fetishworshippers ever imagined that a stone must have a god within it to make it fall, or that a fruit had a godwithin it to make it taste sweet. With regard to such matters as these, it is hardly questionable that mankindfrom the first took strictly positive and scientific views.

But, with respect to all the less familiar occurrences which present themselves, uncultured man, no doubt, hasalways taken himself as the standard of comparison, as the centre and measure of the world; nor could bewell avoid doing so. And finding that his apparently uncaused will has a powerful effect in giving rise tomany occurrences, he naturally enough ascribed other and greater events to other and greater volitions andcame to look upon the world and all that therein is, as the product of the volitions of persons like himself, butstronger, and capable of being appeased or angered, as he himself might be soothed or irritated. Through suchconceptions of the plan and working of the universe all mankind have passed, or are passing. And we maynow consider what has been the effect of the improvement of natural knowledge on the views of men whohave reached this stage, and who have begun to cultivate natural knowledge with no desire but that of"increasing God's honour and bettering man's estate."



For example, what could seem wiser, from a mere material point of view, more innocent, from a theologicalone, to an ancient people, than that they should learn the exact succession of the seasons, as warnings fortheir husbandmen; or the position of the stars, as guides to their rude navigators? But what has grown out ofthis search for natural knowledge of so merely useful a character? You all know the reply.Astronomy,−−which of all sciences has filled men's minds with general ideas of a character most foreign totheir daily experience, and has, more than any other, rendered it impossible for them to accept the beliefs oftheir fathers. Astronomy,−−which tells them that this so vast and seemingly solid earth is but an atom amongatoms, whirling, no man knows whither, through illimitable space; which demonstrates that what we call thepeaceful heaven above us, is but that space, filled by an infinitely subtle matter whose particles are seethingand surging, like the waves of an angry sea; which opens up to us infinite regions where nothing is known, orever seems to have been known, but matter and force, operating according to rigid rules; which leads us tocontemplate phaenomena the very nature of which demonstrates that they must have had a beginning, andthat they must have an end, but the very nature of which also proves that the beginning was, to ourconceptions of time, infinitely remote, and that the end is as immeasurably distant.

But it is not alone those who pursue astronomy who ask for bread and receive ideas. What more harmlessthan the attempt to lift and distribute water by pumping it; what more absolutely and grossly utilitarian? Yetout of pumps grew the discussions about Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum; and then it was discovered thatNature does not abhor a vacuum, but that air has weight; and that notion paved the way for the doctrine thatall matter has weight, and that the force which produces weight is co−extensive with the universe,−−in short,to the theory of universal gravitation and endless force. While learning how to handle gases led to thediscovery of oxygen, and to modern chemistry, and to the notion of the indestructibility of matter.

Again, what simpler, or more absolutely practical, than the attempt to keep the axle of a wheel from heatingwhen the wheel turns round very fast? How useful for carters and gig drivers to know something about this;and how good were it, if any ingenious person would find out the cause of such phaenomena, and thenceeduce a general remedy for them. Such an ingenious person was Count Rumford; and he and his successorshave landed us in the theory of the persistence, or indestructibility, of force. And in the infinitely minute, asin the infinitely great, the seekers after natural knowledge of the kinds called physical and chemical, haveeverywhere found a definite order and succession of events which seem never to be infringed.

And how has it fared with "Physick" and Anatomy? Have the anatomist, the physiologist, or the physician,whose business it has been to devote themselves assiduously to that eminently practical and direct end, thealleviation of the sufferings of mankind,−−have they been able to confine their vision more absolutely to thestrictly useful? I fear they are the worst offenders of all. For if the astronomer has set before us the infinitemagnitude of space, and the practical eternity of the duration of the universe; if the physical and chemicalphilosophers have demonstrated the infinite minuteness of its constituent parts, and the practical eternity ofmatter and of force; and if both have alike proclaimed the universality of a definite and predicable order andsuccession of events, the workers in biology have not only accepted all these, but have added more startlingtheses of their own. For, as the astronomers discover in the earth no centre of the universe, but an eccentricspeck, so the naturalists find man to be no centre of the living world, but one amidst endless modifications oflife; and as the astronomers observe the mark of practically endless time set upon the arrangements of thesolar system so the student of life finds the records of ancient forms of existence peopling the world for ages,which, in relation to human experience, are infinite.

Furthermore, the physiologist finds life to be as dependent for its manifestation of particular moleculararrangements as any physical or chemical phenomenon; and wherever he extends his researches, fixed orderand unchanging causation reveal themselves, as plainly as in the rest of Nature.

Nor can I find that any other fate has awaited the germ of Religion. Arising, like all other kinds ofknowledge, out of the action and interaction of man's mind, with that which is not man's mind, it has taken



the intellectual coverings of Fetishism or Polytheism; of Theism or Atheism; of Superstition or Rationalism.With these, and their relative merits and demerits, I have nothing to do; but this it is needful for my purposeto say, that if the religion of the present differs from that of the past, it is because the theology of the presenthas become more scientific than that of the past; because it has not only renounced idols of wood and idols ofstone, but begins to see the necessity of breaking in pieces the idols built up of books and traditions andfine−spun ecclesiastical cobwebs: and of cherishing the noblest and most human of man's emotions, byworship "for the most part of the silent sort" at the Altar of the Unknown.

Such are a few of the new conceptions implanted in our minds by the improvement of natural knowledge.Men have acquired the ideas of the practically infinite extent of the universe and of its practical eternity; theyare familiar with the conception that our earth is but an infinitesimal fragment of that part of the universewhich can be seen; and that, nevertheless, its duration is, as compared with our standards of time, infinite.They have further acquired the idea that man is but one of innumerable forms of life now existing on theglobe, and that the present existences are but the last of an immeasurable series of predecessors. Moreover,every step they have made in natural knowledge has tended to extend and rivet in their minds the conceptionof a definite order of the universe−−which is embodied in what are called, by an unhappy metaphor, the lawsof Nature−−and to narrow the range and loosen the force of men's belief in spontaneity, or in changes otherthan such as arise out of that definite order itself.

Whether these ideas are well or ill founded is not the question. No one can deny that they exist, and havebeen the inevitable outgrowth of the improvement of natural knowledge. And if so, it cannot be doubted thatthey are changing the form of men's most cherished and most important convictions.

And as regards the second point−−the extent to which the improvement of natural knowledge has remodelledand altered what may be termed the intellectual ethics of men,−−what are among the moral convictions mostfondly held by barbarous and semi−barbarous people?

They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to a readiness tobelieve; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and scepticism a sin; that when good authority haspronounced what is to be believed, and faith has accepted it, reason has no further duty. There are manyexcellent persons who yet hold by these principles, and it is not my present business, or intention, to discusstheir views. All I wish to bring clearly before your minds is the unquestionable fact, that the improvement ofnatural knowledge is effected by methods which directly give the lie to all these convictions, and assume theexact reverse of each to be true.

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticismis the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. And it cannot be otherwise, for every greatadvance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority, the cherishing of the keenestscepticism, the annihilation of the spirit of blind faith; and the most ardent votary of science holds his firmestconvictions, not because the men he most venerates hold them; not because their verity is testified by portentsand wonders; but because his experience teaches him that whenever he chooses to bring these convictionsinto contact with their primary source, Nature−− whenever he thinks fit to test them by appealing toexperiment and to observation−−Nature will confirm them. The man of science has learned to believe injustification, not by faith, but by verification.

Thus, without for a moment pretending to despise the practical results of the improvement of naturalknowledge, and its beneficial influence on material civilisation, it must, I think, be admitted that the greatideas, some of which I have indicated, and the ethical spirit which I have endeavoured to sketch, in the fewmoments which remained at my disposal, constitute the real and permanent significance of naturalknowledge.



If these ideas be destined, as I believe they are, to be more and more firmly established as the world growsolder; if that spirit be fated, as I believe it is, to extend itself into all departments of human thought, and tobecome co−extensive with the range of knowledge; if, as our race approaches its maturity, it discovers, as Ibelieve it will, that there is but one kind of knowledge and but one method of acquiring it; then we, who arestill children, may justly feel it our highest duty to recognise the advisableness of improving naturalknowledge, and so to aid ourselves and our successors in our course towards the noble goal which lies beforemankind.

A LIBERAL EDUCATION

The business which the South London Working Men's College has undertaken is a great work; indeed, Imight say, that Education, with which that college proposes to grapple, is the greatest work of all those whichlie ready to a man's hand just at present.

And, at length, this fact is becoming generally recognised. You cannot go anywhere without hearing a buzzof more or less confused and contradictory talk on this subject−−nor can you fail to notice that, in one pointat any rate, there is a very decided advance upon like discussions in former days. Nobody outside theagricultural interest now dares to say that education is a bad thing. If any representative of the once large andpowerful party, which, in former days, proclaimed this opinion, still exists in the semi−fossil state, he keepshis thoughts to himself. In fact, there is a chorus of voices, almost distressing in their harmony, raised infavour of the doctrine that education is the great panacea for human troubles, and that, if the country is notshortly to go to the dogs, everybody must be educated.

The politicians tell us, "You must educate the masses because they are going to be masters." The clergy joinin the cry for education, for they affirm that the people are drifting away from church and chapel into thebroadest infidelity. The manufacturers and the capitalists swell the chorus lustily. They declare that ignorancemakes bad workmen; that England will soon be unable to turn out cotton goods, or steam engines, cheaperthan other people; and then, Ichabod! Ichabod! the glory will be departed from us. And a few voices are liftedup in favour of the doctrine that the masses should be educated because they are men and women withunlimited capacities of being, doing, and suffering, and that it is as true now, as it ever was, that the peopleperish for lack of knowledge.

These members of the minority, with whom I confess I have a good deal of sympathy, are doubtful whetherany of the other reasons urged in favour of the education of the people are of much value−− whether, indeed,some of them are based upon either wise or noble grounds of action. They question if it be wise to tell peoplethat you will do for them, out of fear of their power, what you have left undone, so long as your only motivewas compassion for their weakness and their sorrows. And, if ignorance of everything which is needful aruler should know is likely to do so much harm in the governing classes of the future, why is it, they askreasonably enough, that such ignorance in the governing classes of the past has not been viewed with equalhorror?

Compare the average artisan and the average country squire, and it may be doubted if you will find a pin tochoose between the two in point of ignorance, class feeling, or prejudice. It is true that the ignorance is of adifferent sort−−that the class feeling is in favour of a different class and that the prejudice has a distinctsavour of wrong−headedness in each case−−but it is questionable if the one is either a bit better, or a bitworse, than the other. The old protectionist theory is the doctrine of trades unions as applied by the squires,and the modern trades unionism is the doctrine of the squires applied by the artisans. Why should we beworse off under one regime than under the other?

Again, this sceptical minority asks the clergy to think whether it is really want of education which keeps the


A LIBERAL EDUCATION 25

masses away from their ministrations−−whether the most completely educated men are not as open toreproach on this score as the workmen; and whether, perchance, this may not indicate that it is not educationwhich lies at the bottom of the matter?

Once more, these people, whom there is no pleasing, venture to doubt whether the glory which rests uponbeing able to undersell all the rest of the world, is a very safe kind of glory−−whether we may not purchase ittoo dear; especially if we allow education, which ought to be directed to the making of men, to be divertedinto a process of manufacturing human tools, wonderfully adroit in the exercise of some technical industry,but good for nothing else.

And, finally, these people inquire whether it is the masses alone who need a reformed and improvededucation. They ask whether the richest of our public schools might not well be made to supply knowledge,as well as gentlemanly habits, a strong class feeling, and eminent proficiency in cricket. They seem to thinkthat the noble foundations of our old universities are hardly fulfilling their functions in their present postureof half−clerical seminaries, half racecourses, where men are trained to win a senior wranglership, or adouble−first, as horses are trained to win a cup, with as little reference to the needs of after−life in the case ofa man as in that of the racer. And, while as zealous for education as the rest, they affirm that, if the educationof the richer classes were such as to fit them to be the leaders and the governors of the poorer; and, if theeducation of the poorer classes were such as to enable them to appreciate really wise guidance and goodgovernance, the politicians need not fear mob− law, nor the clergy lament their want of flocks, nor thecapitalists prognosticate the annihilation of the prosperity of the country.

Such is the diversity of opinion upon the why and the wherefore of education. And my hearers will beprepared to expect that the practical recommendations which are put forward are not less discordant. There isa loud cry for compulsory education. We English, in spite of constant experience to the contrary, preserve atouching faith in the efficacy of acts of Parliament; and I believe we should have compulsory education in thecourses of next session, if there were the least probability that half a dozen leading statesmen of differentparties would agree what that education should be.

Some hold that education without theology is worse than none. Others maintain, quite as strongly, thateducation with theology is in the same predicament. But this is certain, that those who hold the first opinioncan by no means agree what theology should be taught; and that those who maintain the second are in a smallminority.

At any rate "make people learn to read, write, and cipher," say a great many; and the advice is undoubtedlysensible as far as it goes. But, as has happened to me in former days, those who, in despair of getting anythingbetter, advocate this measure, are met with the objection that it is very like making a child practise the use ofa knife, fork, and spoon, without giving it particle of meat. I really don't know what reply is to be made tosuch an objection.

But it would be unprofitable to spend more time in disentangling, or rather in showing up the knots in, theravelled skeins of our neighbours. Much more to the purpose is it to ask if we possess any clue of our ownwhich may guide us among these entanglements. And by way of a beginning, let us ask ourselves−−What iseducation? Above all things, what is our ideal of a thoroughly liberal education?−−of that education which, ifwe could begin life again, we would give ourselves−−of that education which, if we could mould the fates toour own will, we would give our children? Well, I know not what may be your conceptions upon this matter,but I will tell you mine, and I hope I shall find that our views are not very discrepant.

Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one of us would, one day or other, dependupon his winning or losing a game of chess. Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a primaryduty to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces; to have a notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for



all the means of giving and getting out of check? Do you not think that we should look with a disapprobationamounting to scorn, upon the father who allowed his son, or the state which allowed its members, to grow upwithout knowing a pawn from a knight?

Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth, that the life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and,more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of agame infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untoldages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chessboardis the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws ofNature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient.But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance forignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generositywith which the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated−−without haste, butwithout remorse.

My metaphor will remind some of you of the famous picture in which Retzsch has depicted Satan playing atchess with man for his soul. Substitute for the mocking fiend in that picture a calm, strong angel who isplaying for love, as we say, and would rather lose than win−−and I should accept it as an image of humanlife.

Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty game. In other words, education is theinstruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and theirforces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and lovingdesire to move in harmony with those laws. For me, education means neither more nor less than this.Anything which professes to call itself education must be tried by this standard, and if it fails to stand the test,I will not call it education, whatever may be the force of authority, or of numbers, upon the other side.

It is important to remember that, in strictness, there is no such thing as an uneducated man. Take an extremecase. Suppose that an adult man, in the full vigour of his faculties, could be suddenly placed in the world, asAdam is said to have been, and then left to do as he best might. How long would he be left uneducated? Notfive minutes. Nature would begin to teach him, through the eye, the ear, the touch, the properties of objects.Pain and pleasure would be at his elbow telling him to do this and avoid that; and by slow degrees the manwould receive an education which, if narrow, would be thorough, real, and adequate to his circumstances,though there would be no extras and very few accomplishments.

And if to this solitary man entered a second Adam or, better still, an Eve, a new and greater world, that ofsocial and moral phenomena, would be revealed. Joys and woes, compared with which all others might seembut faint shadows, would spring from the new relations. Happiness and sorrow would take the place of thecoarser monitors, pleasure and pain; but conduct would still be shaped by the observation of the naturalconsequences of actions; or, in other words, by the laws of the nature of man.

To every one of us the world was once as fresh and new as to Adam. And then, long before we weresusceptible of any other modes of instruction, Nature took us in hand, and every minute of waking lifebrought its educational influence, shaping our actions into rough accordance with Nature's laws, so that wemight not be ended untimely by too gross disobedience. Nor should I speak of this process of education aspast for any one, be he as old as he may. For every man the world is as fresh as it was at the first day, and asfull of untold novelties for him who has the eyes to see them. And Nature is still continuing her patienteducation of us in that great university, the universe, of which we are all members−−Nature having noTest−Acts.



Those who take honours in Nature's university, who learn the laws which govern men and things and obeythem, are the really great and successful men in this world. The great mass of mankind are the "Poll," whopick up just enough to get through without much discredit. Those who won't learn at all are plucked; and thenyou can't come up again. Nature's pluck means extermination.

Thus the question of compulsory education is settled so far as Nature is concerned. Her bill on that questionwas framed and passed long ago. But, like all compulsory legislation, that of Nature is harsh and wasteful inits operation. Ignorance is visited as sharply as wilful disobedience−−incapacity meets with the samepunishment as crime. Nature's discipline is not even a word and a blow, and the blow first; but the blowwithout the word. It is left to you to find out why your ears are boxed.

The object of what we commonly call education−−that education in which man intervenes and which I shalldistinguish as artificial education−−is to make good these defects in Nature's methods; to prepare the child toreceive Nature's education, neither incapably nor ignorantly, nor with wilful disobedience; and to understandthe preliminary symptoms of her pleasure, without waiting for the box on the ear. In short, all artificialeducation ought to be an anticipation of natural education. And a liberal education is an artificial educationwhich has not only prepared a man to escape the great evils of disobedience to natural laws, but has trainedhim to appreciate and to seize upon the rewards, which Nature scatters with as free a hand as her penalties.

That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the readyservant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whoseintellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready,like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors ofthe mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of thelaws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained tocome to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty,whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.

Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education; for he is, as completely as a man can be, inharmony with Nature. He will make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on together rarely; she ashis ever beneficent mother; he as her mouthpiece, her conscious self, her minister and interpreter.

ON A PIECE OF CHALK

If a well were sunk at our feet in the midst of the city of Norwich, the diggers would very soon findthemselves at work in that white substance almost too soft to be called rock, with which we are all familiar as"chalk."

Not only here, but over the whole county of Norfolk, the well− sinker might carry his shaft down manyhundred feet without coming to the end of the chalk; and, on the sea−coast, where the waves have pared awaythe face of the land which breasts them, the scarped faces of the high cliffs are often wholly formed of thesame material. Northward, the chalk may be followed as far as Yorkshire; on the south coast it appearsabruptly in the picturesque western bays of Dorset, and breaks into the Needles of the Isle of Wight; while onthe shores of Kent it supplies that long line of white cliffs to which England owes her name of Albion.

Were the thin soil which covers it all washed away, a curved band of white chalk, here broader, and therenarrower, might be followed diagonally across England from Lulworth in Dorset, to Flamborough Head inYorkshire−−a distance of over two hundred and eighty miles as the crow flies.

From this band to the North Sea, on the east, and the Channel, on the South, the chalk is largely hidden by


ON A PIECE OF CHALK 28

other deposits; but, except in the Weald of Kent and Sussex, it enters into the very foundation of all thesouth−eastern counties.

Attaining, as it does in some places, a thickness of more than a thousand feet, the English chalk must beadmitted to be a mass of considerable magnitude. Nevertheless, it covers but an insignificant portion of thewhole area occupied by the chalk formation of the globe, which has precisely the same general characters asours, and is found in detached patches, some less, and others more extensive, than the English.

Chalk occurs in north−west Ireland; it stretches over a large part of France,−−the chalk which underlies Parisbeing, in fact, a continuation of that of the London basin; it runs through Denmark and Central Europe, andextends southward to North Africa; while eastward, it appears in the Crimea and in Syria, and may be tracedas far as the shores of the Sea of Aral, in Central Asia.

If all the points at which true chalk occurs were circumscribed, they would lie within an irregular oval aboutthree thousand miles in long diameter−−the area of which would be as great as that of Europe, and wouldmany times exceed that of the largest existing inland sea−−the Mediterranean.

Thus the chalk is no unimportant element in the masonry of the earth's crust, and it impresses a peculiarstamp, varying with the conditions to which it is exposed, on the scenery of the districts in which it occurs.The undulating downs and rounded coombs, covered with sweet−grassed turf, of our inland chalk country,have a peacefully domestic and mutton−suggesting prettiness, but can hardly be called either grand orbeautiful. But on our southern coasts, the wall−sided cliffs, many hundred feet high, with vast needles andpinnacles standing out in the sea, sharp and solitary enough to serve as perches for the wary cormorant confera wonderful beauty and grandeur upon the chalk headlands. And, in the East, chalk has its share in theformation of some of the most venerable of mountain ranges, such as the Lebanon.

What is this wide−spread component of the surface of the earth? and whence did it come?

You may think this no very hopeful inquiry. You may not unnaturally suppose that the attempt to solve suchproblems as these can lead to no result, save that of entangling the inquirer in vague speculations, incapableof refutation and of verification.

If such were really the case, I should have selected some other subject than a "piece of chalk" for mydiscourse. But, in truth, after much deliberation, I have been unable to think of any topic which would so wellenable me to lead you to see how solid is the foundation upon which some of the most startling conclusionsof physical science rest.

A great chapter of the history of the world is written in the chalk. Few passages in the history of man can besupported by such an overwhelming mass of direct and indirect evidence as that which testifies to the truth ofthe fragment of the history of the globe, which I hope to enable you to read, with your own eyes, tonight.

Let me add, that few chapters of human history have a more profound significance for ourselves. I weigh mywords well when I assert, that the man who should know the true history of the bit of chalk which everycarpenter carries about in his breeches−pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is likely, if he will thinkhis knowledge out to its ultimate results, to have a truer, and therefore a better, conception of this wonderfuluniverse, and of man's relation to it, than the most learned student who is deep− read in the records ofhumanity and ignorant of those of Nature.

The language of the chalk is not hard to learn, not nearly so hard as Latin, if you only want to get at the broadfeatures of the story it has to tell; and I propose that we now set to work to spell that story out together.



We all know that if we "burn" chalk the result is quicklime. Chalk, in fact, is a compound of carbonic acidgas, and lime, and when you make it very hot the carbonic acid flies away and the lime is left.

By this method of procedure we see the lime, but we do not see the carbonic acid. If, on the other hand, youwere to powder a little chalk and drop it into a good deal of strong vinegar, there would be a great bubblingand fizzing, and, finally, a clear liquid, in which no sign of chalk would appear. Here you see the carbonicacid in the bubbles; the lime, dissolved in the vinegar, vanishes from sight. There are a great many other waysof showing that chalk is essentially nothing but carbonic acid and quicklime. Chemists enunciate the result ofall the experiments which prove this, by stating that chalk is almost wholly composed of "carbonate of lime."

It is desirable for us to start from the knowledge of this fact, though it may not seem to help us very fartowards what we seek. For carbonate of lime is a widely spread substance, and is met with under very variousconditions. All sorts of limestones are composed of more or less pure carbonate of lime. The crust which isoften deposited by waters which have drained through limestone rocks, in the form of what are calledstalagmites and stalactites, is carbonate of lime. Or, to take a more familiar example, the fur on the inside of atea−kettle is carbonate of lime; and, for anything chemistry tells us to the contrary, the chalk might be a kindof gigantic fur upon the bottom of the earth−kettle, which is kept pretty hot below.

Let us try another method of making the chalk tell us its own history. To the unassisted eye chalk lookssimply like a very loose and open kind of stone. But it is possible to grind a slice of chalk down so thin thatyou can see through it−−until it is thin enough, in fact, to be examined with any magnifying power that maybe thought desirable. A thin slice of the fur of a kettle might be made in the same way. If it were examinedmicroscopically, it would show itself to be a more or less distinctly laminated mineral substance and nothingmore.

But the slice of chalk presents a totally different appearance when placed under the microscope. The generalmass of it is made up of very minute granules; but, imbedded in this matrix, are innumerable bodies, somesmaller and some larger, but, on a rough average, not more than a hundredth of an inch in diameter, having awell−defined shape and structure. A cubic inch of some specimens of chalk may contain hundreds ofthousands of these bodies, compacted together with incalculable millions of the granules.

The examination of a transparent slice gives a good notion of the manner in which the components of thechalk are arranged, and of their relative proportions. But, by rubbing up some chalk with a brush in water andthen pouring off the milky fluid, so as to obtain sediments of different degrees of fineness, the granules andthe minute rounded bodies may be pretty well separated from one another, and submitted to microscopicexamination, either as opaque or as transparent objects. By combining the views obtained in these variousmethods, each of the rounded bodies may be proved to be a beautifully constructed calcareous fabric, madeup of a number of chambers, communicating freely with one another. The chambered bodies are of variousforms. One of the commonest is something like a badly grown raspberry, being formed of a number of nearlyglobular chambers of different sizes congregated together. It is called Globigerina, and some specimens ofchalk consist of little else than Globigerina and granules.

Let us fix our attention upon the Globigerina. It is the spoor of the game we are tracking. If we can learn whatit is and what are the conditions of its existence, we shall see our way to the origin and past history of thechalk.

A suggestion which may naturally enough present itself is, that these curious bodies are the result of someprocess of aggregation which has taken place in the carbonate of lime; that, just as in winter, the rime on ourwindows simulates the most delicate and elegantly arborescent foliage−−proving that the mere mineral watermay, under certain conditions, assume the outward form of organic bodies−−so this mineral substance,carbonate of lime, hidden away in the bowels of the earth, has taken the shape of these chambered bodies. I



am not raising a merely fanciful and unreal objection. Very learned men, in former days, have evenentertained the notion that all the formed things found in rocks are of this nature; and if no such conception isat present held to be admissible, it is because long and varied experience has now shown that mineral matternever does assume the form and structure we find in fossils. If any one were to try to persuade you that anoyster−shell (which is also chiefly composed of carbonate of lime) had crystallized out of sea−water, Isuppose you would laugh at the absurdity. Your laughter would be justified by the fact that all experiencetends to show that oyster−shells are formed by the agency of oysters, and in no other way. And if there wereno better reasons, we should be justified, on like grounds, in believing that Globigerina is not the product ofanything but vital activity.

Happily, however, better evidence in proof of the organic nature of the Globigerinae than that of analogy isforthcoming. It so happens that calcareous skeletons, exactly similar to the Globigerinae of the chalk, arebeing formed, at the present moment, by minute living creatures, which flourish in multitudes, literally morenumerous than the sands of the sea−shore, over a large extent of that part of the earth's surface which iscovered by the ocean.

The history of the discovery of these living Globigerinae, and of the part which they play in rock building, issingular enough. It is a discovery which, like others of no less scientific importance, has arisen, incidentally,out of work devoted to very different and exceedingly practical interests.

When men first took to the sea, they speedily learned to look out for shoals and rocks; and the more theburthen of their ships increased, the more imperatively necessary it became for sailors to ascertain withprecision the depths of the waters they traversed. Out of this necessity grew the use of the lead and soundingline; and, ultimately, marine−surveying, which is the recording of the form of coasts and of the depth of thesea, as ascertained by the sounding−lead, upon charts.

At the same time, it became desirable to ascertain and to indicate the nature of the sea−bottom, since thiscircumstance greatly affects its goodness as holding ground for anchors. Some ingenious tar, whose namedeserves a better fate than the oblivion into which it has fallen, attained this object by "arming" the bottom ofthe lead with a lump of grease, to which more or less of the sand or mud, or broken shells, as the case mightbe, adhered, and was brought to the surface. But, however well adapted such an apparatus might be for roughnautical purposes, scientific accuracy could not be expected from the armed lead, and to remedy its defects(especially when applied to sounding in great depths) Lieut. Brooke, of the American Navy, some years agoinvented a most ingenious machine, by which a considerable portion of the superficial layer of thesea−bottom can be scooped out and brought up from any depth to which the lead descends.

In 1853, Lieut. Brooke obtained mud from the bottom of the North Atlantic, between Newfoundland and theAzores, at a depth of more than ten thousand feet, or two miles, by the help of this sounding apparatus. Thespecimens were sent for examination to Ehrenberg of Berlin, and to Bailey of West Point, and those ablemicroscopists found that this deep−sea mud was almost entirely composed of the skeletons of livingorganisms−−the greater proportion of these being just like the Globigerinae already known to occur in thechalk.

Thus far, the work had been carried on simply in the interests of science, but Lieut. Brooke's method ofsounding acquired a high commercial value, when the enterprise of laying down the telegraph− cablebetween this country and the United States was undertaken. For it became a matter of immense importance toknow, not only the depth of the sea over the whole line along which the cable was to be laid, but the exactnature of the bottom, so as to guard against chances of cutting or fraying the strands of that costly rope. TheAdmiralty consequently ordered Captain Dayman, an old friend and shipmate of mine, to ascertain the depthover the whole line of the cable, and to bring back specimens of the bottom. In former days, such a commandas this might have sounded very much like one of the impossible things which the young prince in the Fairy



Tales is ordered to do before he can obtain the hand of the Princess. However, in the months of June and July,1857, my friend performed the task assigned to him with great expedition and precision without, so far as Iknow, having met with any reward of that kind. The specimens of Atlantic mud which he procured were sentto me to be examined and reported upon.*

* See Appendix to Captain Dayman's "Deep−sea Soundings in the North Atlantic Ocean, between Irelandand Newfoundland, made in H.M.S. Cyclops. Published by order of the Lords Commissioners of theAdmiralty, 1858." They have since formed the subject of an elaborate Memoir by Messrs. Parker and Jones,published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1865.

The result of all these operations is, that we know the contours and the nature of the surface−soil covered bythe North Atlantic, for a distance of seventeen hundred miles from east to west, as well as we know that ofany part of the dry land.

It is a prodigious plain−−one of the widest and most even plains in the world. If the sea were drained off, youmight drive a wagon all the way from Valentia, on the west coast of Ireland, to Trinity Bay, inNewfoundland. And, except upon one sharp incline about two hundred miles from Valentia, I am not quitesure that it would even be necessary to put the skid on, so gentle are the ascents and descents upon that longroute. From Valentia the road would lie down−hill for about 200 miles to the point at which the bottom isnow covered by 1700 fathoms of sea−water. Then would come the central plain, more than a thousand mileswide, the inequalities of the surface of which would be hardly perceptible, though the depth of water upon itnow varies from 10,000 to 15,000 feet; and there are places in which Mont Blanc might be sunk withoutshowing its peak above water. Beyond this, the ascent on the American side commences, and gradually leads,for about 300 miles, to the Newfoundland shore.

Almost the whole of the bottom of this central plain (which extends for many hundred miles in a north andsouth direction) is covered by a fine mud, which, when brought to the surface, dries into a greyish−whitefriable substance. You can write with this on a blackboard, if you are so inclined; and, to the eye, it is quitelike very soft, greyish chalk. Examined chemically, it proves to be composed almost wholly of carbonate oflime; and if you make a section of it, in the same way as that of the piece of chalk was made, and view it withthe microscope, it presents innumerable Globigerinae embedded in a granular matrix.

Thus this deep−sea mud is substantially chalk. I say substantially, because there are a good many minordifferences; but as these have no bearing on the question immediately before us,−− which is the nature of theGlobigerinae of the chalk,−−it is unnecessary to speak of them.

Globigerinae of every size, from the smallest to the largest, are associated together in the Atlantic mud, andthe chambers of many are filled by a soft animal matter. This soft substance is, in fact, the remains of thecreature to which the Globigerina shell, or rather skeleton, owes its existence−−and which is an animal of thesimplest imaginable description. It is, in fact, a mere particle of living jelly, without defined parts of anykind−− without a mouth, nerves, muscles, or distinct organs, and only manifesting its vitality to ordinaryobservation by thrusting out and retracting from all parts of its surface, long filamentous processes, whichserve for arms and legs. Yet this amorphous particle, devoid of everything which, in the higher animals, wecall organs, is capable of feeding, growing and multiplying; of separating from the ocean the small proportionof carbonate of lime which is dissolved in sea−water; and of building up that substance into a skeleton foritself, according to a pattern which can be imitated by no other known agency.

The notion that animals can live and flourish in the sea, at the vast depths from which apparently livingGlobigerinae have been brought up, does not agree very well with our usual conceptions respecting theconditions of animal life; and it is not so absolutely impossible as it might at first appear to be, that theGlobigerinae of the Atlantic sea−bottom do not live and die where they are found.



As I have mentioned, the soundings from the great Atlantic plain are almost entirely made up ofGlobigerinae, with the granules which have been mentioned and some few other calcareous shells; but asmall percentage of the chalky mud−−perhaps at most some five per cent of it−−is of a different nature, andconsists of shells and skeletons composed of silex, or pure flint. These silicious bodies belong partly to thelowly vegetable organisms which are called Diatomaceae, and partly to the minute, and extremely simple,animals, termed Radiolaria. It is quite certain that these creatures do not live at the bottom of the ocean, but atits surface−−where they may be obtained in prodigious numbers by the use of a properly constructed net.Hence it follows that these silicious organisms, though they are not heavier than the lightest dust, must havefallen, in some cases, through fifteen thousand feet of water, before they reached their final resting−place onthe ocean floor. And, considering how large a surface these bodies expose in proportion to their weight, it isprobable that they occupy a great length of time in making their burial journey from the surface of theAtlantic to the bottom.

But if the Radiolaria and Diatoms are thus rained upon the bottom of the sea, from the superficial layer of itswaters in which they pass their lives, it is obviously possible that the Globigerinae may be similarly derived;and if they were so, it would be much more easy to understand how they obtain their supply of food than it isat present. Nevertheless, the positive and negative evidence all points the other way. The skeletons of thefull−grown, deep− sea Globigerinae are so remarkably solid and heavy in proportion to their surface as toseem little fitted for floating; and, as a matter of fact, they are not to be found along with the Diatoms andRadiolaria, in the uppermost stratum of the open ocean.

It has been observed, again, that the abundance of Globigerinae, in proportion to other organisms, of likekind, increases with the depth of the sea; and that deep−water Globigerinae are larger than those which live inshallower parts of the sea; and such facts negative the supposition that these organisms have been swept bycurrents from the shallows into the deeps of the Atlantic.

It therefore seems to be hardly doubtful that these wonderful creatures live and die at the depths in which theyare found.

However, the important points for us are, that the living Globigerinae are exclusively marine animals, theskeletons of which abound at the bottom of deep seas; and that there is not a shadow of reason for believingthat the habits of the Globigerinae of the chalk differed from those of the existing species. But if this be true,there is no escaping the conclusion that the chalk itself is the dried mud of an ancient deep sea.

In working over the soundings collected by Captain Dayman, I was surprised to find that many of what I havecalled the "granules" of that mud, were not, as one might have been tempted to think at first, the mere powderand waste of Globigerinae, but that they had a definite form and size. I termed these bodies "coccoliths," anddoubted their organic nature. Dr. Wallich verified my observation, and added the interesting discovery, that,not unfrequently, bodies similar to these "coccoliths" were aggregated together into spheroids, which hetermed "coccospheres." So far as we knew, these bodies, the nature of which is extremely puzzling andproblematical, were peculiar to the Atlantic soundings.

But, a few years ago, Mr. Sorby, in making a careful examination of the chalk by means of thin sections andotherwise, observed, as Ehrenberg had done before him, that much of its granular basis possesses a definiteform. Comparing these formed particles with those in the Atlantic soundings, he found the two to beidentical; and thus proved that the chalk, like the soundings, contains these mysterious coccoliths andcoccospheres. Here was a further and a most interesting confirmation, from internal evidence, of the essentialidentity of the chalk with modern deep−sea mud. Globigerinae, coccoliths, and coccospheres are round as thechief constituents of both, and testify to the general similarity of the conditions under which both have beenformed.



The evidence furnished by the hewing, facing, and superposition of the stones of the Pyramids, that thesestructures were built by men, has no greater weight than the evidence that the chalk was built byGlobigerinae; and the belief that those ancient pyramid− builders were terrestrial and air−breathing creatureslike ourselves, is it not better based than the conviction that the chalk−makers lived in the sea?

But as our belief in the building of the Pyramids by men is not only grounded on the internal evidencesafforded by these structures, but gathers strength from multitudinous collateral proofs, and is clinched by thetotal absence of any reason for a contrary belief; so the evidence drawn from the Globigerinae that the chalkis an ancient sea−bottom, is fortified by innumerable independent lines of evidence; and our belief in the truthof the conclusion to which all positive testimony tends, receives the like negative justification from the factthat no other hypothesis has a shadow of foundation.

It may be worth while briefly to consider a few of these collateral proofs that the chalk was deposited at thebottom of the sea.

The great mass of the chalk is composed, as we have seen, of the skeletons of Globigerinae, and other simpleorganisms, imbedded in granular matter. Here and there, however, this hardened mud of the ancient seareveals the remains of higher animals which have lived and died, and left their hard parts in the mud, just asthe oysters die and leave their shells behind them, in the mud of the present seas.

There are, at the present day, certain groups of animals which are never found in fresh waters, being unable tolive anywhere but in the sea. Such are the corals; those corallines which are called Polycoa; those creatureswhich fabricate the lamp−shells, and are called Brachiopoda; the pearly Nautilus, and all animals allied to it;and all the forms of sea−urchins and star−fishes.

Not only are all these creatures confined to salt water at the present day; but, so far as our records of the pastgo, the conditions of their existence have been the same: hence, their occurrence in any deposit is as strongevidence as can be obtained, that that deposit was formed in the sea. Now the remains of animals of all thekinds which have been enumerated, occur in the chalk, in greater or less abundance; while not one of thoseforms of shell−fish which are characteristic of fresh water has yet been observed in it.

When we consider that the remains of more than three thousand distinct species of aquatic animals have beendiscovered among the fossils of the chalk, that the great majority of them are of such forms as are now metwith only in the sea, and that there is no reason to believe that any one of them inhabited fresh water−−thecollateral evidence that the chalk represents an ancient sea−bottom acquires as great force as the proofderived from the nature of the chalk itself. I think you will now allow that I did not overstate my case when Iasserted that we have as strong grounds for believing that all the vast area of dry land, at present occupied bythe chalk, was once at the bottom of the sea, as we have for any matter of history whatever; while there is nojustification for any other belief.

No less certain it is that the time during which the countries we now call south−east England, France,Germany, Poland, Russia, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, were more or less completely covered by a deep sea, was ofconsiderable duration.

We have already seen that the chalk is, in places, more than a thousand feet thick. I think you will agree withme, that it must have taken some time for the skeletons of animalcules of a hundredth of an inch in diameterto heap up such a mass as that. I have said that throughout the thickness of the chalk the remains of otheranimals are scattered. These remains are often in the most exquisite state of preservation. The valves of theshell−fishes are commonly adherent; the long spines of some of the sea−urchins, which would be detached bythe smallest jar, often remain in their places. In a word, it is certain that these animals have lived and diedwhen the place which they now occupy was the surface of as much of the chalk as had then been deposited;



and that each has been covered up by the layer of Globigerina mud, upon which the creatures imbedded alittle higher up have, in like manner, lived and died. But some of these remains prove the existence of reptilesof vast size in the chalk sea. These lived their time, and had their ancestors and descendants, which assuredlyimplies time, reptiles being of slow growth.

There is more curious evidence, again, that the process of covering up, or, in other words, the deposit ofGlobigerina skeletons, did not go on very fast. It is demonstrable that an animal of the cretaceous sea mightdie, that its skeleton might lie uncovered upon the sea−bottom long enough to lose all its outward coveringsand appendages by putrefaction; and that, after this had happened, another animal might attach itself to thedead and naked skeleton, might grow to maturity, and might itself die before the calcareous mud had buriedthe whole.

Cases of this kind are admirably described by Sir Charles Lyell. He speaks of the frequency with whichgeologists find in the chalk a fossilized sea−urchin, to which is attached the lower valve of a Crania. This is akind of shell−fish, with a shell composed of two pieces, of which, as in the oyster, one is fixed and the otherfree.

"The upper valve is almost invariably wanting, though occasionally found in a perfect state of preservation inthe white chalk at some distance. In this case, we see clearly that the sea−urchin first lived from youth to age,then died and lost its spines, which were carried away. Then the young Crania adhered to the bared shell,grew and perished in its turn; after which, the upper valve was separated from the lower, before the Echinusbecame enveloped in chalky mud."

A specimen in the Museum of Practical Geology, in London, still further prolongs the period which musthave elapsed between the death of the sea−urchin, and its burial by the Globigerinae. For the outward face ofthe valve of a Crania, which is attached to a sea−urchin (Micraster), is itself overrun by an incrustingcoralline, which spreads thence over more or less of the surface of the sea−urchin. It follows that, after theupper valve of the Crania fell off, the surface of the attached valve must have remained exposed long enoughto allow of the growth of the whole corraline, since corallines do not live imbedded in mud.

The progress of knowledge may, one day, enable us to deduce from such facts as these the maximum rate atwhich the chalk can have accumulated, and thus to arrive at the minimum duration of the chalk period.Suppose that the valve of the Crania upon which a coralline has fixed itself in the way just described, is soattached to the sea−urchin that no part of it is more than an inch above the face upon which the sea−urchinrests. Then, as the coralline could not have fixed itself, if the Crania had been covered up with chalk mud,and could not have lived had itself been so covered it follows, that an inch of chalk mud could not haveaccumulated within the time between the death and decay of the soft parts of the sea−urchin and the growthof the coralline to the full size which it has attained. If the decay of the soft parts of the sea−urchin; theattachment, growth to maturity, and decay of the Crania; and the subsequent attachment and growth of thecoralline, took a year (which is a low estimate enough), the accumulation of the inch of chalk must havetaken more than a year: and the deposit of a thousand feet of chalk must, consequently, have taken more thantwelve thousand years.

The foundation of all this calculation is, of course, a knowledge of the length of time the Crania and thecoralline needed to attain their full size; and, on this head, precise knowledge is at present wanting. But thereare circumstances which tend to show, that nothing like an inch of chalk has accumulated during the life of aCrania; and, on any probable estimate of the length of that life, the chalk period must have had a much longerduration than that thus roughly assigned to it.

Thus, not only is it certain that the chalk is the mud of an ancient sea−bottom; but it is no less certain, that thechalk sea existed during an extremely long period, though we may not be prepared to give a precise estimate



of the length of that period in years. The relative duration is clear, though the absolute duration may not bedefinable. The attempt to affix any precise date to the period at which the chalk sea began, or ended, itsexistence, is baffled by difficulties of the same kind. But the relative age of the cretaceous epoch may bedetermined with as great ease and certainty as the long duration of that epoch.

You will have heard of the interesting discoveries recently made, in various parts of Western Europe, of flintimplements, obviously worked into shape by human hands, under circumstances which show conclusivelythat man is a very ancient denizen of these regions.

It has been proved that the old populations of Europe, whose existence has been revealed to us in this way,consisted of savages, such as the Esquimaux are now; that, in the country which is now France, they huntedthe reindeer, and were familiar with the ways of the mammoth and the bison. The physical geography ofFrance was in those days different from what it is now−−the river Somme, for instance, having cut its bed ahundred feet deeper between that time and this; and, it is probable, that the climate was more like that ofCanada or Siberia, than that of Western Europe.

The existence of these people is forgotten even in the traditions of the oldest historical nations. The name andfame of them had utterly vanished until a few years back; and the amount of physical change which has beeneffected since their day, renders it more than probable that, venerable as are some of the historical nations, theworkers of the chipped flints of Hoxne or of Amiens are to them, as they are to us, in point of antiquity.

But, if we assign to these hoar relics of long−vanished generations of men the greatest age that can possiblybe claimed for them, they are not older than the drift, or boulder clay, which, in comparison with the chalk, isbut a very juvenile deposit. You need go no further than your own sea−board for evidence of this fact. At oneof the most charming spots on the coast of Norfolk, Cromer, you will see the boulder clay forming a vastmass, which lies upon the chalk, and must consequently have come into existence after it. Huge boulders ofchalk are, in fact, included in the clay, and have evidently been brought to the position they now occupy, bythe same agency as that which has planted blocks of syenite from Norway side by side with them.

The chalk, then, is certainly older than the boulder clay. If you ask how much, I will again take you no furtherthan the same spot upon your own coasts for evidence. I have spoken of the boulder clay and drift as restingupon the chalk. That is not strictly true. Interposed between the chalk and the drift is a comparativelyinsignificant layer, containing vegetable matter. But that layer tells a wonderful history. It is full of stumps oftrees standing as they grew. Fir−trees are there with their cones, and hazel−bushes with their nuts; there standthe stools of oak and yew trees, beeches and alders. Hence this stratum is appropriately called the"forest−bed."

It is obvious that the chalk must have been up−heaved and converted into dry land, before the timber treescould grow upon it. As the boles of some of these trees are from two to three feet in diameter, it is no lessclear that the dry land this formed remained in the same condition for long ages. And not only do the remainsof stately oaks and well−grown firs testify to the duration of this condition of things, but additional evidenceto the same effect is afforded by the abundant remains of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotomuses and othergreat wild beasts, which it has yielded to the zealous search of such men as the Rev. Mr. Gunn.

When you look at such a collection as he has formed, and bethink you that these elephantine bones didveritably carry their owners about, and these great grinders crunch, in the dark woods of which the forest−bedis now the only trace, it is impossible not to feel that they are as good evidence of the lapse of time as theannual rings of the tree−stumps.

Thus there is a writing upon the walls of cliffs at Cromer, and whoso runs may read it. It tells us, with anauthority which cannot be impeached, that the ancient sea−bed of the chalk sea was raised up, and remained



dry land, until it was covered with forest, stocked with the great game whose spoils have rejoiced yourgeologists. How long it remained in that condition cannot be said; but "the whirligig of time brought itsrevenges" in those days as in these. That dry land, with the bones and teeth of generations of long−livedelephants, hidden away among the gnarled roots and dry leaves of its ancient trees, sank gradually to thebottom of the icy sea, which covered it with huge masses of drift and boulder clay. Sea−beasts, such as thewalrus, now restricted to the extreme north, paddled about where birds had twittered among the topmosttwigs of the fir−trees. How long this state of things endured we know not, but at length it came to an end. Theupheaved glacial mud hardened into the soil of modern Norfolk. Forests grew once more, the wolf and thebeaver replaced the reindeer and the elephant; and at length what we call the history of England dawned.

Thus you have within the limits of your own county, proof that the chalk can justly claim a very much greaterantiquity than even the oldest physical traces of mankind. But we may go further and demonstrate, byevidence of the same authority as that which testifies to the existence of the father of men, that the chalk isvastly older than Adam himself.

The Book of Genesis informs us that Adam, immediately upon his creation, and before the appearance ofEve, was placed in the Garden of Eden. The problem of the geographical position of Eden has greatly vexedthe spirits of the learned in such matters, but there is one point respecting which, so far as I know, nocommentator has ever raised a doubt. This is, that of the four rivers which are said to run out of it, Euphratesand Hiddekel are identical with the rivers now known by the names of Euphrates and Tigris.

But the whole country in which these mighty rivers take their origin, and through which they run, iscomposed of rocks which are either of the same age as the chalk, or of later date. So that the chalk must notonly have been formed, but, after its formation, the time required for the deposit of these later rocks, and fortheir upheaval into dry land, must have elapsed, before the smallest brook which feeds the swift stream of"the great river, the river of Babylon," began to flow.

Thus, evidence which cannot be rebutted, and which need not be strengthened, though if time permitted Imight indefinitely increase its quantity, compels you to believe that the earth, from the time of the chalk tothe present day, has been the theatre of a series of changes as vast in their amount, as they were slow in theirprogress. The area on which we stand has been first sea and then land, for at least four alternations; and hasremained in each of these conditions for a period of great length.

Nor have these wonderful metamorphoses of sea into land, and of land into sea, been confined to one cornerof England. During the chalk period, or "cretaceous epoch," not one of the present great physical features ofthe globe was in existence. Our great mountain ranges, Pyrenees, Alps, Himalayas, Andes, have all beenupheaved since the chalk was deposited, and the cretaceous sea flowed over the sites of Sinai and Ararat.

All this is certain, because rocks of cretaceous, or still later, date have shared in the elevatory movementswhich gave rise to these mountain chains; and may be found perched up, in some cases, many thousand feethigh upon their flanks. And evidence of equal cogency demonstrates that, though, in Norfolk, the forest−bedrests directly upon the chalk, yet it does so, not because the period at which the forest grew immediatelyfollowed that at which the chalk was formed, but because an immense lapse of time, represented elsewhereby thousands of feet of rock, is not indicated at Cromer.

I must ask you to believe that there is no less conclusive proof that a still more prolonged succession ofsimilar changes occurred, before the chalk was deposited. Nor have we any reason to think that the first termin the series of these changes is known. The oldest sea−beds preserved to us are sands, and mud, and pebbles,the wear and tear of rocks which were formed in still older oceans.



But, great as is the magnitude of these physical changes of the world, they have been accompanied by a noless striking series of modifications in its living inhabitants.

All the great classes of animals, beasts of the field, fowls of the air, creeping things, and things which dwellin the waters, flourished upon the globe long ages before the chalk was deposited. Very few, however, if any,of these ancient forms of animal life were identical with those which now live. Certainly not one of the higheranimals was of the same species as any of those now in existence. The beasts of the field, in the days beforethe chalk, were not our beasts of the field, nor the fowls of the air such as those which the eye of men hasseen flying, unless his antiquity dates infinitely further back than we at present surmise. If we could becarried back into those times, we should be as one suddenly set down in Australia before it was colonized.We should see mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes, insects, snails, and the like, clearly recognisable as such, andyet not one of them would be just the same as those with which we are familiar, and many would beextremely different.

From that time to the present, the population of the world has undergone slow and gradual, but incessantchanges. There has been no grand catastrophe−−no destroyer has swept away the forms of life of one period,and replaced them by a totally new creation; but one species has vanished and another has taken its place;creatures of one type of structure have diminished, those of another have increased, as time has passed on.And thus, while the differences between the living creatures of the time before the chalk and those of thepresent day appear startling, if placed side by side, we are led from one to the other by the most gradualprogress, if we follow the course of Nature through the whole series of those relics of her operations whichshe has left behind.

And it is by the population of the chalk sea that the ancient and the modern inhabitants of the world are mostcompletely connected. The groups which are dying out flourish, side by side, with the groups which are nowthe dominant forms of life.

Thus the chalk contains remains of those strange flying and swimming reptiles, the pterodactyl, theichthyosaurus, and the plesiosaurus, which are found in no later deposits, but abounded in preceding ages.The chambered shells called ammonites and belemnites, which are so characteristic of the period precedingthe cretaceous, in like manner die with it.

But, amongst these fading remainders of a previous state of things, are some very modern forms of life,looking like Yankee pedlars among a tribe of Red Indians. Crocodiles of modern type appear; bony fishes,many of them very similar to existing species almost supplant the forms of fish which predominate in moreancient seas; and many kinds of living shellfish first become known to us in the chalk. The vegetationacquires a modern aspect. A few living animals are not even distinguishable as species, from those whichexisted at that remote epoch. The Globigerina of the present day, for example, is not different specificallyfrom that of the chalk; and the same may be said of many other Foraminifera. I think it probable that criticaland unprejudiced examination will show that more than one species of much higher animals have had asimilar longevity; but the only example, which I can at present give confidently is the snake's−headlamp−shell (Terebratulina caput serpentis), which lives in our English seas and abounded (as Terebratulinastriata of authors) in the chalk.

The longest line of human ancestry must hide its diminished head before the pedigree of this insignificantshell−fish. We Englishmen are proud to have an ancestor who was present at the Battle of Hastings. Theancestors of Terebratulina caput serpentis may have been present at a battle of Ichthyosauria in that part ofthe sea which, when the chalk was forming, flowed over the site of Hastings. While all around has changed,this Terebratulina has peacefully propagated its species from generation to generation, and stands to this day,as a living testimony to the continuity of the present with the past history of the globe.



Up to this moment I have stated, so far as I know, nothing but well−authenticated facts, and the immediateconclusions which they force upon the mind.

But the mind is so constituted that it does not willingly rest in facts and immediate causes, but seeks alwaysafter a knowledge of the remoter links in the chain of causation.

Taking the many changes of any given spot of the earth's surface, from sea to land and from land to sea, as anestablished fact, we cannot refrain from asking ourselves how these changes have occurred. And when wehave explained them−−as they must be explained−−by the alternate slow movements of elevation anddepression which have affected the crust of the earth, we go still further back, and ask, Why thesemovements?

I am not certain that any one can give you a satisfactory answer to that question. Assuredly I cannot. All thatcan be said, for certain, is, that such movements are part of the ordinary course of nature, inasmuch as theyare going on at the present time. Direct proof may be given, that some parts of the land of the northernhemisphere are at this moment insensibly rising and others insensibly sinking; and there is indirect, butperfectly satisfactory, proof, that an enormous area now covered by the Pacific has been deepened thousandsof feet, since the present inhabitants of that sea came into existence.

Thus there is not a shadow of a reason for believing that the physical changes of the globe, in past times havebeen effected by other than natural causes.

Is there any more reason for believing that the concomitant modifications in the forms of the livinginhabitants of the globe have been brought about in other ways?

Before attempting to answer this question, let us try to form a distinct mental picture of what has happened,in some special case.

The crocodiles are animals which, as a group, have a very vast antiquity. They abounded ages before thechalk was deposited; they throng the rivers in warm climates, at the present day. There is a difference in theform of the joints of the back−bone, and in some minor particulars, between the crocodiles of the presentepoch and those which lived before the chalk; but in the cretaceous epoch, as I have already mentioned, thecrocodiles had assumed the modern type of structure. Notwithstanding this, the crocodiles of the chalk are notidentically the same as those which lived in the times called "older tertiary," which succeeded the cretaceousepoch; and the crocodiles of the older tertiaries are not identical with those of the newer tertiaries, nor arethese identical with existing forms. I leave open the question whether particular species may have lived onfrom epoch to epoch. But each epoch has had its peculiar crocodiles; though all, since the chalk, havebelonged to the modern type, and differ simply in their proportions, and in such structural particulars as arediscernible only to trained eyes.

How is the existence of this long succession of different species of crocodiles to be accounted for?

Only two suppositions seem to be open to us−−Either each species of crocodile has been specially created, orit has arisen out of some pre−existing form by the operation of natural causes.

Choose your hypothesis; I have chosen mine. I can find no warranty for believing in the distinct creation of ascore of successive species of crocodiles in the course of countless ages of time. Science gives nocountenance to such a wild fancy; nor can even the perverse ingenuity of a commentator pretend to discoverthis sense, in the simple words in which the writer of Genesis records the proceedings of the fifth and sixthdays of the Creation.



On the other hand, I see no good reason for doubting the necessary alternative, that all these varied specieshave been evolved from pre−existing crocodilian forms, by the operation of causes as completely a part of thecommon order of nature, as those which have effected the changes of the inorganic world.

Few will venture to affirm that the reasoning which applies to crocodiles loses its force among other animals,or among plants. If one series of species has come into existence by the operation of natural causes, it seemsfolly to deny that all may have arisen in the same way.

A small beginning has led us to a great ending. If I were to put the bit of chalk with which we started into thehot but obscure flame of burning hydrogen, it would presently shine like the sun. It seems to me that thisphysical metamorphosis is no false image of what has been the result of our subjecting it to a jet of fervent,though nowise brilliant, thought to−night. It has become luminous, and its clear rays, penetrating the abyss ofthe remote past, have brought within our ken some stages of the evolution of the earth. And in the shifting"without haste, but without rest" of the land and sea, as in the endless variation of the forms assumed byliving beings, we have observed nothing but the natural product of the forces originally possessed by thesubstance of the universe.

THE PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION

I know quite well that launching myself into this discussion is a very dangerous operation; that it is a verylarge subject, and one which is difficult to deal with, however much I may trespass upon your patience in thetime allotted to me. But the discussion is so fundamental, it is so completely impossible to make up one'smind on these matters until one has settled the question, that I will even venture to make the experiment. Agreat lawyer−statesman and philosopher of a former age−−I mean Francis Bacon −−said that truth came outof error much more rapidly than it came out of confusion. There is a wonderful truth in that saying. Next tobeing right in this world, the best of all things is to be clearly and definitely wrong, because you will comeout somewhere. If you go buzzing about between right and wrong, vibrating and fluctuating, you come outnowhere; but if you are absolutely and thoroughly and persistently wrong, you must, some of these days,have the extreme good fortune of knocking your head against a fact, and that sets you all straight again. So Iwill not trouble myself as to whether I may be right or wrong in what I am about to say, but at any rate I hopeto be clear and definite; and then you will be able to judge for yourselves whether, in following out the trainof thought I have to introduce, you knock your heads against facts or not.

I take it that the whole object of education is, in the first place, to train the faculties of the young in such amanner as to give their possessors the best chance of being happy and useful in their generation; and, in thesecond place, to furnish them with the most important portions of that immense capitalised experience of thehuman race which we call knowledge of various kinds. I am using the term knowledge in its widest possiblesense; and the question is, what subjects to select by training and discipline, in which the object I have justdefined may be best attained.

I must call your attention further to this fact, that all the subjects of our thoughts−−all feelings andpropositions (leaving aside our sensations as the mere materials and occasions of thinking and feeling), allour mental furniture−−may be classified under one of two heads−−as either within the province of theintellect, something that can be put into propositions and affirmed or denied; or as within the province offeeling, or that which, before the name was defiled, was called the aesthetic side of our nature, and which canneither be proved nor disproved, but only felt and known.

According to the classification which I have put before you, then, the subjects of all knowledge are divisibleinto the two groups, matters of science and matters of art; for all things with which the reasoning facultyalone is occupied, come under the province of science; and in the broadest sense, and not in the narrow and


THE PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION 40

technical sense in which we are now accustomed to use the word art, all things feelable, all things which stirour emotions, come under the term of art, in the sense of the subject−matter of the aesthetic faculty. So thatwe are shut up to this−−that the business of education is, in the first place, to provide the young with themeans and the habit of observation; and, secondly, to supply the subject−matter of knowledge either in theshape of science or of art, or of both combined.

Now, it is a very remarkable fact−−but it is true of most things in this world−−that there is hardly anythingone−sided, or of one nature; and it is not immediately obvious what of the things that interest us may beregarded as pure science, and what may be regarded as pure art. It may be that there are some peculiarlyconstituted persons who, before they have advanced far into the depths of geometry, find artistic beauty aboutit; but, taking the generality of mankind, I think it may be said that, when they begin to learn mathematics,their whole souls are absorbed in tracing the connection between the premisses and the conclusion, and thatto them geometry is pure science. So I think it may be said that mechanics and osteology are pure science. Onthe other hand, melody in music is pure art. You cannot reason about it; there is no proposition involved in it.So, again, in the pictorial art, an arabesque, or a "harmony in grey," touches none but the aesthetic faculty.But a great mathematician, and even many persons who are not great mathematicians, will tell you that theyderive immense pleasure from geometrical reasonings. Everybody knows mathematicians speak of solutionsand problems as "elegant," and they tell you that a certain mass of mystic symbols is "beautiful, quite lovely."Well, you do not see it. They do see it, because the intellectual process, the process of comprehending thereasons symbolised by these figures and these signs, confers upon them a sort of pleasure, such as an artisthas in visual symmetry. Take a science of which I may speak with more confidence, and which is the mostattractive of those I am concerned with. It is what we call morphology, which consists in tracing out the unityin variety of the infinitely diversified structures of animals and plants. I cannot give you any example of athorough aesthetic pleasure more intensely real than a pleasure of this kind−−the pleasure which arises inone's mind when a whole mass of different structures run into one harmony as the expression of a central law.That is where the province of art overlays and embraces the province of intellect. And, if I may venture toexpress an opinion on such a subject, the great majority of forms of art are not in the sense what I just nowdefined them to be−−pure art; but they derive much of their quality from simultaneous and even unconsciousexcitement of the intellect.

When I was a boy, I was very fond of music, and I am so now; and it so happened that I had the opportunityof hearing much good music. Among other things, I had abundant opportunities of hearing that great oldmaster, Sebastian Bach. I remember perfectly well−− though I knew nothing about music then, and, I mayadd, know nothing whatever about it now−−the intense satisfaction and delight which I had in listening, bythe hour together, to Bach's fugues. It is a pleasure which remains with me, I am glad to think; but, of lateyears, I have tried to find out the why and wherefore, and it has often occurred to me that the pleasure derivedfrom musical compositions of this kind is essentially of the same nature as that which is derived from pursuitswhich are commonly regarded as purely intellectual. I mean, that the source of pleasure is exactly the same asin most of my problems in morphology−−that you have the theme in one of the old master's works followedout in all its endless variations, always appearing and always reminding you of unity in variety. So inpainting; what is called "truth to nature" is the intellectual element coming in, and truth to nature dependsentirely upon the intellectual culture of the person to whom art is addressed. If you are in Australia, you mayget credit for being a good artist−−I mean among the natives−−if you can draw a kangaroo after a fashion.But, among men of higher civilisation, the intellectual knowledge we possess brings its criticism into ourappreciation of works of art, and we are obliged to satisfy it, as well as the mere sense of beauty in colour andin outline. And so, the higher the culture and information of those whom art addresses, the more exact andprecise must be what we call its "truth to nature."

If we turn to literature, the same thing is true, and you find works of literature which may be said to be pureart. A little song of Shakespeare or of Goethe is pure art; it is exquisitely beautiful, although its intellectualcontent may be nothing. A series of pictures is made to pass before your mind by the meaning of words, and



the effect is a melody of ideas. Nevertheless, the great mass of the literature we esteem is valued, not merelybecause of having artistic form, but because of its intellectual content; and the value is the higher the moreprecise, distinct, and true is that intellectual content. And, if you will let me for a moment speak of the veryhighest forms of literature, do we not regard them as highest simply because the more we know the truer theyseem, and the more competent we are to appreciate beauty the more beautiful they are? No man everunderstands Shakespeare until he is old, though the youngest may admire him, the reason being that hesatisfies the artistic instinct of the youngest and harmonises with the ripest and richest experience of theoldest.

I have said this much to draw your attention to what, in my mind, lies at the root of all this matter, and at theunderstanding of one another by the men of science on the one hand, and the men of literature, and history,and art, on the other. It is not a question whether one order of study or another should predominate. It is aquestion of what topics of education you shall select which will combine all the needful elements in such dueproportion as to give the greatest amount of food, support, and encouragement to those faculties which enableus to appreciate truth, and to profit by those sources of innocent happiness which are open to us, and, at thesame time, to avoid that which is bad, and coarse, and ugly, and keep clear of the multitude of pitfalls anddangers which beset those who break through the natural or moral laws.

I address myself, in this spirit, to the consideration of the question of the value of purely literary education. Isit good and sufficient, or is it insufficient and bad? Well, here I venture to say that there are literaryeducations and literary educations. If I am to understand by that term the education that was current in thegreat majority of middle−class schools, and upper schools too, in this country when I was a boy, and whichconsisted absolutely and almost entirely in keeping boys for eight or ten years at learning the rules of Latinand Greek grammar, construing certain Latin and Greek authors, and possibly making verses which, had theybeen English verses, would have been condemned as abominable doggerel,−−if that is what you mean byliberal education, then I say it is scandalously insufficient and almost worthless. My reason for saying so isnot from the point of view of science at all, but from the point of view of literature. I say the thing professesto be literary education that is not a literary education at all. It was not literature at all that was taught, butscience in a very bad form. It is quite obvious that grammar is science and not literature. The analysis of atext by the help of the rules of grammar is just as much a scientific operation as the analysis of a chemicalcompound by the help of the rules of chemical analysis. There is nothing that appeals to the aesthetic facultyin that operation; and I ask multitudes of men of my own age, who went through this process, whether theyever had a conception of art or literature until they obtained it for themselves after leaving school? Then youmay say, "If that is so, if the education was scientific, why cannot you be satisfied with it?" I say, becausealthough it is a scientific training, it is of the most inadequate and inappropriate kind. If there is any good atall in scientific education it is that men should be trained, as I said before, to know things for themselves atfirst hand, and that they should understand every step of the reason of that which they do.

I desire to speak with the utmost respect of that science−− philology−−of which grammar is a part and parcel;yet everybody knows that grammar, as it is usually learned at school, affords no scientific training. It is taughtjust as you would teach the rules of chess or draughts. On the other hand, if I am to understand by a literaryeducation the study of the literatures of either ancient or modern nations−−but especially those of antiquity,and especially that of ancient Greece; if this literature is studied, not merely from the point of view ofphilological science, and its practical application to the interpretation of texts, but as an exemplification ofand commentary upon the principles of art; if you look upon the literature of a people as a chapter in thedevelopment of the human mind, if you work out this in a broad spirit, and with such collateral references tomorals and politics, and physical geography, and the like as are needful to make you comprehend what themeaning of ancient literature and civilisation is,−−then, assuredly, it affords a splendid and noble education.But I still think it is susceptible of improvement, and that no man will ever comprehend the real secret of thedifference between the ancient world and our present time, unless he has learned to see the difference whichthe late development of physical science has made between the thought of this day and the thought of that,



and he will never see that difference, unless he has some practical insight into some branches of physicalscience; and you must remember that a literary education such as that which I have just referred to, is out ofthe reach of those whose school life is cut short at sixteen or seventeen.

But, you will say, all this is fault−finding; let us hear what you have in the way of positive suggestion. Then Iam bound to tell you that, if I could make a clean sweep of everything−−I am very glad I cannot because Imight, and probably should, make mistakes,−− but if I could make a clean sweep of everything and startafresh, I should, in the first place, secure that training of the young in reading and writing, and in the habit ofattention and observation, both to that which is told them, and that which they see, which everybody agreesto. But in addition to that, I should make it absolutely necessary for everybody, for a longer or shorter period,to learn to draw. Now, you may say, there are some people who cannot draw, however much they may betaught. I deny that in toto, because I never yet met with anybody who could not learn to write. Writing is aform of drawing; therefore if you give the same attention and trouble to drawing as you do to writing, dependupon it, there is nobody who cannot be made to draw, more or less well. Do not misapprehend me. I do notsay for one moment you would make an artistic draughtsman. Artists are not made; they grow. You mayimprove the natural faculty in that direction, but you cannot make it; but you can teach simple drawing, andyou will find it an implement of learning of extreme value. I do not think its value can be exaggerated,because it gives you the means of training the young in attention and accuracy, which are the two things inwhich all mankind are more deficient than in any other mental quality whatever. The whole of my life hasbeen spent in trying to give my proper attention to things and to be accurate, and I have not succeeded as wellas I could wish; and other people, I am afraid, are not much more fortunate. You cannot begin this habit tooearly, and I consider there is nothing of so great a value as the habit of drawing, to secure those two desirableends.

Then we come to the subject−matter, whether scientific or aesthetic, of education, and I should naturally haveno question at all about teaching the elements of physical science of the kind I have sketched, in a practicalmanner; but among scientific topics, using the word scientific in the broadest sense, I would also include theelements of the theory of morals and of that of political and social life, which, strangely enough, it neverseems to occur to anybody to teach a child. I would have the history of our own country, and of all theinfluences which have been brought to bear upon it, with incidental geography, not as a mere chronicle ofreigns and battles, but as a chapter in the development of the race, and the history of civilisation.

Then with respect to aesthetic knowledge and discipline, we have happily in the English language one of themost magnificent storehouses of artistic beauty and of models of literary excellence which exists in the worldat the present time. I have said before, and I repeat it here, that if a man cannot get literary culture of thehighest kind out of his Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Hobbes, and Bishop Berkeley,to mention only a few of our illustrious writers−−I say, if he cannot get it out of those writers he cannot get itout of anything; and I would assuredly devote a very large portion of the time of every English child to thecareful study of the models of English writing of such varied and wonderful kind as we possess, and, what isstill more important and still more neglected, the habit of using that language with precision, with force, andwith art. I fancy we are almost the only nation in the world who seem to think that composition comes bynature. The French attend to their own language, the Germans study theirs; but Englishmen do not seem tothink it is worth their while. Nor would I fail to include, in the course of study I am sketching, translations ofall the best works of antiquity, or of the modern world. It is a very desirable thing to read Homer in Greek;but if you don't happen to know Greek, the next best thing we can do is to read as good a translation of it aswe have recently been furnished with in prose. You won't get all you would get from the original, but youmay get a great deal; and to refuse to know this great deal because you cannot get all, seems to be as sensibleas for a hungry man to refuse bread because he cannot get partridge. Finally, I would add instruction in eithermusic or painting, or, if the child should be so unhappy, as sometimes happens, as to have no faculty foreither of those, and no possibility of doing anything in any artistic sense with them, then I would see whatcould be done with literature alone; but I would provide, in the fullest sense, for the development of the



aesthetic side of the mind. In my judgment, those are all the essentials of education for an English child. Withthat outfit, such as it might be made in the time given to education which is within the reach of nine−tenths ofthe population−−with that outfit, an Englishman, within the limits of English life, is fitted to go anywhere, tooccupy the highest positions, to fill the highest offices of the State, and to become distinguished in practicalpursuits, in science, or in art. For, if he have the opportunity to learn all those things, and have his minddisciplined in the various directions the teaching of those topics would have necessitated, then, assuredly, hewill be able to pick up, on his road through life, all the rest of the intellectual baggage he wants.

If the educational time at our disposition were sufficient, there are one or two things I would add to those Ihave just now called the essentials; and perhaps you will be surprised to hear, though I hope you will not, thatI should add, not more science, but one, or, if possible, two languages. The knowledge of some otherlanguage than one's own is, in fact, of singular intellectual value. Many of the faults and mistakes of theancient philosophers are traceable to the fact that they knew no language but their own, and were often ledinto confusing the symbol with the thought which it embodied. I think it is Locke who says that one−half ofthe mistakes of philosophers have arisen from questions about words; and one of the safest ways of deliveringyourself from the bondage of words is, to know how ideas look in words to which you are not accustomed.That is one reason for the study of language; another reason is, that it opens new fields in art and in science.Another is the practical value of such knowledge; and yet another is this, that if your languages are properlychosen, from the time of learning the additional languages you will know your own language better than everyou did. So, I say, if the time given to education permits, add Latin and German. Latin, because it is the keyto nearly one−half of English and to all the Romance languages; and German, because it is the key to almostall the remainder of English, and helps you to understand a race from whom most of us have sprung, and whohave a character and a literature of a fateful force in the history of the world, such as probably has beenallotted to those of no other people, except the Jews, the Greeks, and ourselves. Beyond these, the essentialand the eminently desirable elements of all education, let each man take up his special line−−the historiandevote himself to his history, the man of science to his science, the man of letters to his culture of that kind,and the artist to his special pursuit.

Bacon has prefaced some of his works with no more than this:Franciscus Bacon sic cogitavit; let "sic cogitavi" be theepilogue to what I have ventured to address to you to−night.

THE METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION

The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of thehuman mind. It is simply the mode at which all phenomena are reasoned about, rendered precise and exact.There is no more difference, but there is just the same kind of difference, between the mental operations of aman of science and those of an ordinary person, as there is between the operations and methods of a baker orof a butcher weighing out his goods in common scales, and the operations of a chemist in performing adifficult and complex analysis by means of his balance and finely graduated weights. It is not that the actionof the scales in the one case, and the balance in the other, differ in the principles of their construction ormanner of working; but the beam of one is set on an infinitely finer axis than the other, and of course turns bythe addition of a much smaller weight.

You will understand this better, perhaps, if I give you some familiar example. You have all heard it repeated,I dare say, that men of science work by means of induction and deduction, and that by the help of theseoperations, they, in a sort of sense, wring from Nature certain other things, which are called natural laws, andcauses, and that out of these, by some cunning skill of their own, they build up hypotheses and theories. Andit is imagined by many, that the operations of the common mind can be by no means compared with theseprocesses, and that they have to be acquired by a sort of special apprenticeship to the craft. To hear all theselarge words, you would think that the mind of a man of science must be constituted differently from that of


THE METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 44

his fellow men; but if you will not be frightened by terms, you will discover that you are quite wrong, andthat all these terrible apparatus are being used by yourselves every day and every hour of your lives.

There is a well−known incident in one of Moliere's plays, where the author makes the hero expressunbounded delight on being told that he had been talking prose during the whole of his life. In the same way,I trust, that you will take comfort, and be delighted with yourselves, on the discovery that you have beenacting on the principles of inductive and deductive philosophy during the same period. Probably there is notone here who has not in the course of the day had occasion to set in motion a complex train of reasoning, ofthe very same kind, though differing of course in degree, as that which a scientific man goes through intracing the causes of natural phenomena.

A very trivial circumstance will serve to exemplify this. Suppose you go into a fruiterer's shop, wanting anapple,−−you take up one, and, on biting it, you find it is sour; you look at it, and see that it is hard and green.You take up another one, and that too is hard, green, and sour. The shopman offers you a third; but, beforebiting it, you examine it, and find that it is hard and green, and you immediately say that you will not have it,as it must be sour, like those that you have already tried.

Nothing can be more simple than that, you think; but if you will take the trouble to analyse and trace out intoits logical elements what has been done by the mind, you will be greatly surprised. In the first place you haveperformed the operation of induction. You found that, in two experiences, hardness and greenness in appleswent together with sourness. It was so in the first case, and it was confirmed by the second. True, it is a verysmall basis, but still it is enough to make an induction from; you generalise the facts, and you expect to findsourness in apples where you get hardness and greenness. You found upon that a general law that all hard andgreen apples are sour; and that, so far as it goes, is a perfect induction. Well, having got your natural law inthis way, when you are offered another apple which you find is hard and green, you say, "All hard and greenapples are sour; this apple is hard and green, therefore this apple is sour." That train of reasoning is whatlogicians call a syllogism, and has all its various parts and terms,−−its major premiss, its minor premiss andits conclusion. And, by the help of further reasoning, which, if drawn out, would have to be exhibited in twoor three other syllogisms, you arrive at your final determination, "I will not have that apple." So that, you see,you have, in the first place, established a law by induction, and upon that you have founded a deduction, andreasoned out the special particular case. Well now, suppose, having got your conclusion of the law, that atsome time afterwards, you are discussing the qualities of apples with a friend: you will say to him, "It is avery curious thing,−−but I find that all hard and green apples are sour!" Your friend says to you, "But how doyou know that?" You at once reply, "Oh, because I have tried them over and over again, and have alwaysfound them to be so." Well, if we were talking science instead of common sense, we should call that anexperimental verification. And, if still opposed, you go further, and say, "I have heard from the people inSomersetshire and Devonshire, where a large number of apples are grown, that they have observed the samething. It is also found to be the case in Normandy, and in North America. In short, I find it to be the universalexperience of mankind wherever attention has been directed to the subject." Whereupon, your friend, unlesshe is a very unreasonable man, agrees with you, and is convinced that you are quite right in the conclusionyou have drawn. He believes, although perhaps he does not know he believes it, that the more extensiveverifications are,−−that the more frequently experiments have been made, and results of the same kindarrived at,−−that the more varied the conditions under which the same results are attained, the more certain isthe ultimate conclusion, and he disputes the question no further. He sees that the experiment has been triedunder all sorts of conditions, as to time, place, and people, with the same result; and he says with you,therefore, that the law you have laid down must be a good one, and he must believe it.

In science we do the same thing;−−the philosopher exercises precisely the same faculties, though in a muchmore delicate manner. In scientific inquiry it becomes a matter of duty to expose a supposed law to everypossible kind of verification, and to take care, moreover, that this is done intentionally, and not left to a mereaccident, as in the case of the apples. And in science, as in common life, our confidence in a law is in exact



proportion to the absence of variation in the result of our experimental verifications. For instance, if you letgo your grasp of an article you may have in your hand, it will immediately fall to the ground. That is a verycommon verification of one of the best established laws of nature−−that of gravitation. The method by whichmen of science establish the existence of that law is exactly the same as that by which we have establishedthe trivial proposition about the sourness of hard and green apples. But we believe it in such an extensive,thorough, and unhesitating manner because the universal experience of mankind verifies it, and we can verifyit ourselves at any time; and that is the strongest possible foundation on which any natural law can rest.

So much, then, by way of proof that the method of establishing laws in science is exactly the same as thatpursued in common life. Let us now turn to another matter (though really it is but another phase of the samequestion), and that is, the method by which, from the relations of certain phenomena, we prove that somestand in the position of causes towards the others.

I want to put the case clearly before you, and I will therefore show you what I mean by another familiarexample. I will suppose that one of you, on coming down in the morning to the parlor of your house, findsthat a tea−pot and some spoons which had been left in the room on the previous evening are gone,−−thewindow is open, and you observe the mark of a dirty hand on the window−frame, and perhaps, in addition tothat, you notice the impress of a hob− nailed shoe on the gravel outside. All these phenomena have struckyour attention instantly, and before two seconds have passed you say, "Oh, somebody has broken open thewindow, entered the room, and run off with the spoons and the tea−pot!" That speech is out of your mouth ina moment. And you will probably add, "I know there has; I am quite sure of it!" You mean to say exactlywhat you know; but in reality you are giving expression to what is, in all essential particulars, an hypothesis.You do not KNOW it at all; it is nothing but an hypothesis rapidly framed in your own mind. And it is anhypothesis founded on a long train of inductions and deductions.

What are those inductions and deductions, and how have you got at this hypothesis? You have observed inthe first place, that the window is open; but by a train of reasoning involving many inductions anddeductions, you have probably arrived long before at the general law−−and a very good one it is−−thatwindows do not open of themselves; and you therefore conclude that something has opened the window. Asecond general law that you have arrived at in the same way is, that tea−pots and spoons do not go out of awindow spontaneously, and you are satisfied that, as they are not now where you left them, they have beenremoved. In the third place, you look at the marks on the windowsill, and the shoe−marks outside, and yousay that in all previous experience the former kind of mark has never been produced by anything else but thehand of a human being; and the same experience shows that no other animal but man at present wears shoeswith hob−nails in them such as would produce the marks in the gravel. I do not know, even if we coulddiscover any of those "missing links" that are talked about, that they would help us to any other conclusion!At any rate the law which states our present experience is strong enough for my present purpose. You nextreach the conclusion that, as these kind of marks have not been left by any other animal than man, or areliable to be formed in any other way than a man's hand and shoe, the marks in question have been formed bya man in that way. You have, further, a general law, founded on observation and experience, and that, too, is,I am sorry to say, a very universal and unimpeachable one,−−that some men are thieves; and you assume atonce from all these premisses−−and that is what constitutes your hypothesis−−that the man who made themarks outside and on the window−sill, opened the window, got into the room, and stole your tea−pot andspoons. You have now arrived at a vera causa;−−you have assumed a cause which, it is plain, is competent toproduce all the phenomena you have observed. You can explain all these phenomena only by the hypothesisof a thief. But that is a hypothetical conclusion, of the justice of which you have no absolute proof at all; it isonly rendered highly probable by a series of inductive and deductive reasonings.

I suppose your first action, assuming that you are a man of ordinary common sense, and that you haveestablished this hypothesis to your own satisfaction, will very likely be to go off for the police, and set themon the track of the burglar, with the view to the recovery of your property. But just as you are starting with



this object, some person comes in, and on learning what you are about, says, "My good friend, you are goingon a great deal too fast. How do you know that the man who really made the marks took the spoons? It mighthave been a monkey that took them, and the man may have merely looked in afterwards." You wouldprobably reply, "Well, that is all very well, but you see it is contrary to all experience of the way tea−pots andspoons are abstracted; so that, at any rate, your hypothesis is less probable than mine." While you are talkingthe thing over in this way, another friend arrives, one of the good kind of people that I was talking of a littlewhile ago. And he might say, "Oh, my dear sir, you are certainly going on a great deal too fast. You are mostpresumptuous. You admit that all these occurrences took place when you were fast asleep, at a time when youcould not possibly have known anything about what was taking place. How do you know that the laws ofNature are not suspended during the night? It may be that there has been some kind of supernaturalinterference in this case." In point of fact, he declares that your hypothesis is one of which you cannot at alldemonstrate the truth, and that you are by no means sure that the laws of Nature are the same when you areasleep as when you are awake.

Well, now, you cannot at the moment answer that kind of reasoning. You feel that your worthy friend has yousomewhat at a disadvantage. You will feel perfectly convinced in your own mind, however, that you are quiteright, and you say to him, "My good friend, I can only be guided by the natural probabilities of the case, andif you will be kind enough to stand aside and permit me to pass, I will go and fetch the police." Well, we willsuppose that your journey is successful, and that by good luck you meet with a policeman; that eventually theburglar is found with your property on his person, and the marks correspond to his hand and to his boots.Probably any jury would consider those facts a very good experimental verification of your hypothesis,touching the cause of the abnormal phenomena observed in your parlor, and would act accordingly.

Now, in this supposititious case, I have taken phenomena of a very common kind, in order that you might seewhat are the different steps in an ordinary process of reasoning, if you will only take the trouble to analyse itcarefully. All the operations I have described, you will see, are involved in the mind of any man of sense inleading him to a conclusion as to the course he should take in order to make good a robbery and punish theoffender. I say that you are led, in that case, to your conclusion by exactly the same train of reasoning as thatwhich a man of science pursues when he is endeavouring to discover the origin and laws of the most occultphenomena. The process is, and always must be, the same; and precisely the same mode of reasoning wasemployed by Newton and Laplace in their endeavours to discover and define the causes of the movements ofthe heavenly bodies, as you, with your own common sense, would employ to detect a burglar. The onlydifference is, that the nature of the inquiry being more abstruse, every step has to be most carefully watched,so that there may not be a single crack or flaw in your hypothesis. A flaw or crack in many of the hypothesesof daily life may be of little or no moment as affecting the general correctness of the conclusions at which wemay arrive; but, in a scientific inquiry, a fallacy, great or small, is always of importance, and is sure to be inthe long run constantly productive of mischievous if not fatal results.

Do not allow yourselves to be misled by the common notion that an hypothesis is untrustworthy simplybecause it is an hypothesis. It is often urged, in respect to some scientific conclusion, that, after all, it is onlyan hypothesis. But what more have we to guide us in nine−tenths of the most important affairs of daily lifethan hypotheses, and often very ill−based ones? So that in science, where the evidence of an hypothesis issubjected to the most rigid examination, we may rightly pursue the same course. You may have hypotheses,and hypotheses. A man may say, if he likes, that the moon is made of green cheese: that is an hypothesis. Butanother man, who has devoted a great deal of time and attention to the subject, and availed himself of themost powerful telescopes and the results of the observations of others, declares that in his opinion it isprobably composed of materials very similar to those of which our own earth is made up: and that is also onlyan hypothesis. But I need not tell you that there is an enormous difference in the value of the two hypotheses.That one which is based on sound scientific knowledge is sure to have a corresponding value; and that whichis a mere hasty random guess is likely to have but little value. Every great step in our progress in discoveringcauses has been made in exactly the same way as that which I have detailed to you. A person observing the



occurrence of certain facts and phenomena asks, naturally enough, what process, what kind of operationknown to occur in Nature applied to the particular case, will unravel and explain the mystery? Hence youhave the scientific hypothesis; and its value will be proportionate to the care and completeness with which itsbasis had been tested and verified. It is in these matters as in the commonest affairs of practical life: the guessof the fool will be folly, while the guess of the wise man will contain wisdom. In all cases, you see that thevalue of the result depends on the patience and faithfulness with which the investigator applies to hishypothesis every possible kind of verification.

ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE

In order to make the title of this discourse generally intelligible, I have translated the term "Protoplasm,"which is the scientific name of the substance of which I am about to speak, by the words "the physical basisof life." I suppose that, to many, the idea that there is such a thing as a physical basis, or matter, of life maybe novel−−so widely spread is the conception of life as a something which works through matter, but isindependent of it; and even those who are aware that matter and life are inseparably connected, may not beprepared for the conclusion plainly suggested by the phrase, "THE physical basis or matter of life," that thereis some one kind of matter which is common to all living beings, and that their endless diversities are boundtogether by a physical, as well as an ideal, unity. In fact, when first apprehended, such a doctrine as thisappears almost shocking to common sense.

What, truly, can seem to be more obviously different from one another, in faculty, in form, and in substance,than the various kinds of living beings? What community of faculty can there be between the bright−colouredlichen, which so nearly resembles a mere mineral incrustation of the bare rock on which it grows, and thepainter, to whom it is instinct with beauty, or the botanist, whom it feeds with knowledge?

Again, think of the microscopic fungus−−a mere infinitesimal ovoid particle, which finds space and durationenough to multiply into countless millions in the body of a living fly; and then of the wealth of foliage, theluxuriance of flower and fruit, which lies between this bald sketch of a plant and the giant pine of California,towering to the dimensions of a cathedral spire, or the Indian fig, which covers acres with its profoundshadow, and endures while nations and empires come and go around its vast circumference. Or, turning to theother half of the world of life, picture to yourselves the great Finner whale, hugest of beasts that live, or havelived, disporting his eighty or ninety feet of bone, muscle and blubber, with easy roll, among waves in whichthe stoutest ship that ever left dockyard would flounder hopelessly; and contrast him with the invisibleanimalcules−−mere gelatinous specks, multitudes of which could, in fact, dance upon the point of a needlewith the same ease as the angels of the Schoolmen could, in imagination. With these images before yourminds, you may well ask, what community of form, or structure, is there between the animalcule and thewhale; or between the fungus and the fig−tree? And, a fortiori, between all four?

Finally, if we regard substance, or material composition, what hidden bond can connect the flower which agirl wears in her hair and the blood which courses through her youthful veins; or, what is there in commonbetween the dense and resisting mass of the oak, or the strong fabric of the tortoise, and those broad disks ofglassy jelly which may be seen pulsating through the waters of a calm sea, but which drain away to merefilms in the hand which raises them out of their element?

Such objections as these must, I think, arise in the mind of every one who ponders, for the first time, upon theconception of a single physical basis of life underlying all the diversities of vital existence; but I propose todemonstrate to you that, notwithstanding these apparent difficulties, a threefold unity−− namely, a unity ofpower or faculty, a unity of form, and a unity of substantial composition−−does pervade the whole livingworld.


ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 48

No very abstruse argumentation is needed, in the first place to prove that the powers, or faculties, of all kindsof living matter, diverse as they may be in degree, are substantially similar in kind.

Goethe has condensed a survey of all powers of mankind into the well−known epigram:−−

"Warum treibt sich das Volk so und schreit? Es will sich ernahrenKinder zeugen, und die nahren so gut es vermag.. . . . . . . . . . . . .Weiter bringt es kein Mensch, stell' er sich wie er auch will."

In physiological language this means, that all the multifarious and complicated activities of man arecomprehensible under three categories. Either they are immediately directed towards the maintenance anddevelopment of the body, or they effect transitory changes in the relative positions of parts of the body, orthey tend towards the continuance of the species. Even those manifestations of intellect, of feeling, and ofwill, which we rightly name the higher faculties, are not excluded from this classification, inasmuch as toevery one but the subject of them, they are known only as transitory changes in the relative positions of partsof the body. Speech, gesture, and every other form of human action are, in the long run, resolvable intomuscular contraction, and muscular contraction is but a transitory change in the relative positions of the partsof a muscle. But the scheme which is large enough to embrace the activities of the highest form of life, coversall those of the lower creatures. The lowest plant, or animalcule, feeds, grows, and reproduces its kind. Inaddition, all animals manifest those transitory changes of form which we class under irritability andcontractility; and, it is more than probable, that when the vegetable world is thoroughly explored, we shallfind all plants in possession of the same powers, at one time or other of their existence.

I am not now alluding to such phaenomena, at once rare and conspicuous, as those exhibited by the leaflets ofthe sensitive plants, or the stamens of the barberry, but to much more widely spread, and at the same time,more subtle and hidden, manifestations of vegetable contractility. You are doubtless aware that the commonnettle owes its stinging property to the innumerable stiff and needle−like, though exquisitely delicate, hairswhich cover its surface. Each stinging−needle tapers from a broad base to a slender summit, which, thoughrounded at the end, is of such microscopic fineness that it readily penetrates, and breaks off in, the skin. Thewhole hair consists of a very delicate outer case of wood, closely applied to the inner surface of which is alayer of semi−fluid matter, full of innumerable granules of extreme minuteness. This semi−fluid lining isprotoplasm, which thus constitutes a kind of bag, full of a limpid liquid, and roughly corresponding in formwith the interior of the hair which it fills. When viewed with a sufficiently high magnifying power, theprotoplasmic layer of the nettle hair is seen to be in a condition of unceasing activity. Local contractions ofthe whole thickness of its substance pass slowly and gradually from point to point, and give rise to theappearance of progressive waves, just as the bending of successive stalks of corn by a breeze produces theapparent billows of a cornfield.

But, in addition to these movements, and independently of them, the granules are driven, in relatively rapidstreams, through channels in the protoplasm which seem to have a considerable amount of persistence. Mostcommonly, the currents in adjacent parts of the protoplasm take similar directions; and, thus, there is ageneral stream up one side of the hair and down the other. But this does not prevent the existence of partialcurrents which take different routes; and sometimes trains of granules may be seen coursing swiftly inopposite directions within a twenty−thousandth of an inch of one another; while, occasionally, oppositestreams come into direct collision, and, after a longer or shorter struggle, one predominates. The cause ofthese currents seems to lie in contractions of the protoplasm which bounds the channels in which they flow,but which are so minute that the best microscopes show only their effects, and not themselves.

The spectacle afforded by the wonderful energies prisoned within the compass of the microscopic hair of aplant, which we commonly regard as a merely passive organism, is not easily forgotten by one who haswatched its display, continued hour after hour, without pause or sign of weakening. The possible complexity



of many other organic forms, seemingly as simple as the protoplasm of the nettle, dawns upon one; and thecomparison of such a protoplasm to a body with an internal circulation, which has been put forward by aneminent physiologist, loses much of its startling character. Currents similar to those of the hairs of the nettlehave been observed in a great multitude of very different plants, and weighty authorities have suggested thatthey probably occur, in more or less perfection, in all young vegetable cells. If such be the case, thewonderful noonday silence of a tropical forest is, after all, due only to the dulness of our hearing; and couldour ears catch the murmur of these tiny Maelstroms, as they whirl in the innumerable myriads of living cellswhich constitute each tree, we should be stunned, as with the roar of a great city.

Among the lower plants, it is the rule rather than the exception, that contractility should be still more openlymanifested at some periods of their existence. The protoplasm of Algae and Fungi becomes, under manycircumstances, partially, or completely, freed from its woody case, and exhibits movements of its wholemass, or is propelled by the contractility of one, or more, hair−like prolongations of its body, which are calledvibratile cilia. And, so far as the conditions of the manifestation of the phaenomena of contractility have yetbeen studied, they are the same for the plant as for the animal. Heat and electric shocks influence both, and inthe same way, though it may be in different degrees. It is by no means my intention to suggest that there is nodifference in faculty between the lowest plant and the highest, or between plants and animals. But thedifference between the powers of the lowest plant, or animal, and those of the highest, is one of degree, not ofkind, and depends, as Milne−Edwards long ago so well pointed out, upon the extent to which the principle ofthe division of labour is carried out in the living economy. In the lowest organism all parts are competent toperform all functions, and one and the same portion of protoplasm may successfully take on the function offeeding, moving, or reproducing apparatus. In the highest, on the contrary, a great number of parts combineto perform each function, each part doing its allotted share of the work with great accuracy and efficiency,but being useless for any other purpose.

On the other hand, notwithstanding all the fundamental resemblances which exist between the powers of theprotoplasm in plants and in animals, they present a striking difference (to which I shall advert more at lengthpresently), in the fact that plants can manufacture fresh protoplasm out of mineral compounds, whereasanimals are obliged to procure it ready made, and hence, in the long run, depend upon plants. Upon whatcondition this difference in the powers of the two great divisions of the world of life depends, nothing is atpresent known.

With such qualifications as arises out of the last−mentioned fact, it may be truly said that the acts of all livingthings are fundamentally one. Is any such unity predicable of their forms? Let us seek in easily verified factsfor a reply to this question. If a drop of blood be drawn by pricking one's finger, and viewed with properprecautions, and under a sufficiently high microscopic power, there will be seen, among the innumerablemultitude of little, circular, discoidal bodies, or corpuscles, which float in it and give it its colour, acomparatively small number of colourless corpuscles, of somewhat larger size and very irregular shape. If thedrop of blood be kept at the temperature of the body, these colourless corpuscles will be seen to exhibit amarvellous activity, changing their forms with great rapidity, drawing in and thrusting out prolongations oftheir substance, and creeping about as if they were independent organisms.

The substance which is thus active is a mass of protoplasm, and its activity differs in detail, rather than inprinciple, from that of the protoplasm of the nettle. Under sundry circumstances the corpuscle dies andbecomes distended into a round mass, in the midst of which is seen a smaller spherical body, which existed,but was more or less hidden, in the living corpuscle, and is called its nucleus. Corpuscles of essentiallysimilar structure are to be found in the skin, in the lining of the mouth, and scattered through the wholeframework of the body. Nay, more; in the earliest condition of the human organism, in that state in which ithas but just become distinguishable from the egg in which it arises, it is nothing but an aggregation of suchcorpuscles, and every organ of the body was, once, no more than such an aggregation.



Thus a nucleated mass of protoplasm turns out to be what may be termed the structural unit of the humanbody. As a matter of fact, the body, in its earliest state, is a mere multiple of such units; and in its perfectcondition, it is a multiple of such units, variously modified.

But does the formula which expresses the essential structural character of the highest animal cover all therest, as the statement of its powers and faculties covered that of all others? Very nearly. Beast and fowl,reptile and fish, mollusk, worm, and polype, are all composed of structural units of the same character,namely, masses of protoplasm with a nucleus. There are sundry very low animals, each of which, structurally,is a mere colourless blood−corpuscle, leading an independent life. But, at the very bottom of the animal scale,even this simplicity becomes simplified, and all the phaenomena of life are manifested by a particle ofprotoplasm without a nucleus. Nor are such organisms insignificant by reason of their want of complexity. Itis a fair question whether the protoplasm of those simplest forms of life, which people an immense extent ofthe bottom of the sea, would not outweigh that of all the higher living beings which inhabit the land puttogether. And in ancient times, no less than at the present day, such living beings as these have been thegreatest of rock builders.

What has been said of the animal world is no less true of plants. Imbedded in the protoplasm at the broad, orattached, end of the nettle hair, there lies a spheroidal nucleus. Careful examination further proves that thewhole substance of the nettle is made up of a repetition of such masses of nucleated protoplasm, eachcontained in a wooden case, which is modified in form, sometimes into a woody fibre, sometimes into a ductor spiral vessel, sometimes into a pollen grain, or an ovule. Traced back to its earliest state, the nettle arises asthe man does, in a particle of nucleated protoplasm. And in the lowest plants, as in the lowest animals, asingle mass of such protoplasm may constitute the whole plant, or the protoplasm may exist without anucleus.

Under these circumstances it may well be asked, how is one mass of non−nucleated protoplasm to bedistinguished from another? why call one "plant" and the other "animal"?

The only reply is that, so far as form is concerned, plants and animals are not separable, and that, in manycases, it is a mere matter of convention whether we call a given organism an animal or a plant. There is aliving body called Aethalium septicum, which appears upon decaying vegetable substances, and, in one of itsforms, is common upon the surfaces of tan−pits. In this condition it is, to all intents and purposes, a fungus,and formerly was always regarded as such; but the remarkable investigations of De Bary have shown that, inanother condition, the Aethalium is an actively locomotive creature, and takes in solid matters, upon which,apparently, it feeds, thus exhibiting the most characteristic feature of animality. Is this a plant; or is it ananimal? Is it both; or is it neither? Some decide in favour of the last supposition, and establish an intermediatekingdom, a sort of biological No Man's Land for all these questionable forms. But, as it is admittedlyimpossible to draw any distinct boundary line between this no man's land and the vegetable world on the onehand, or the animal, on the other, it appears to me that this proceeding merely doubles the difficulty which,before, was single.

Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the potter: which, bake it andpaint it as he will, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the commonest brick orsun−dried clod.

Thus it becomes clear that all living powers are cognate, and that all living forms are fundamentally of onecharacter. The researches of the chemist have revealed a no less striking uniformity of material compositionin living matter.

In perfect strictness, it is true that chemical investigation can tell us little or nothing, directly, of thecomposition of living matter, inasmuch as such matter must needs die in the act of analysis,−−and upon this



very obvious ground, objections, which I confess seem to me to be somewhat frivolous, have been raised tothe drawing of any conclusions whatever respecting the composition of actually living matter, from that ofthe dead matter of life, which alone is accessible to us. But objectors of this class do not seem to reflect that itis also, in strictness, true that we know nothing about the composition of any body whatever, as it is. Thestatement that a crystal of calc−spar consists of carbonate of lime, is quite true, if we only mean that, byappropriate processes, it may be resolved into carbonic acid and quicklime. If you pass the same carbonicacid over the very quicklime thus obtained, you will obtain carbonate of lime again; but it will not becalc−spar, nor anything like it. Can it, therefore, be said that chemical analysis teaches nothing about thechemical composition of calc−spar? Such a statement would be absurd; but it is hardly more so than the talkone occasionally hears about the uselessness of applying the results of chemical analysis to the living bodieswhich have yielded them.

One fact, at any rate, is out of reach of such refinements, and this is, that all the forms of protoplasm whichhave yet been examined contain the four elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, in very complexunion, and that they behave similarly towards several reagents. To this complex combination, the nature ofwhich has never been determined with exactness, the name of Protein has been applied. And if we use thisterm with such caution as may properly arise out of our comparative ignorance of the things for which itstands, it may be truly said, that all protoplasm is proteinaceous, or, as the white, or albumen, of an egg is oneof the commonest examples of a nearly pure proteine matter, we may say that all living matter is more or lessalbuminoid.

Perhaps it would not yet be safe to say that all forms of protoplasm are affected by the direct action of electricshocks; and yet the number of cases in which the contraction of protoplasm is shown to be affected by thisagency increases every day.

Nor can it be affirmed with perfect confidence, that all forms of protoplasm are liable to undergo that peculiarcoagulation at a temperature of 40−50 degrees centigrade, which has been called "heat−stiffening," thoughKuhne's beautiful researches have proved this occurrence to take place in so many and such diverse livingbeings, that it is hardly rash to expect that the law holds good for all.

Enough has, perhaps, been said to prove the existence of a general uniformity in the character of theprotoplasm, or physical basis, of life, in whatever group of living beings it may be studied. But it will beunderstood that this general uniformity by no means excludes any amount of special modifications of thefundamental substance. The mineral, carbonate of lime, assumes an immense diversity of characters, thoughno one doubts that, under all these Protean changes, it is one and the same thing.

And now, what is the ultimate fate, and what the origin, of the matter of life?

Is it, as some of the older naturalists supposed, diffused throughout the universe in molecules, which areindestructible and unchangeable in themselves; but, in endless transmigration, unite in innumerablepermutations, into the diversified forms of life we know? Or, is the matter of life composed of ordinarymatter, differing from it only in the manner in which its atoms are aggregated? Is it built up of ordinarymatter, and again resolved into ordinary matter when its work is done?

Modern science does not hesitate a moment between these alternatives. Physiology writes over the portals oflife−−

"Debemur morti nos nostraque,"

with a profounder meaning than the Roman poet attached to that melancholy line. Under whatever disguise ittakes refuge, whether fungus or oak, worm or man, the living protoplasm not only ultimately dies and is



resolved into its mineral and lifeless constituents, but is always dying, and, strange as the paradox may sound,could not live unless it died.

In the wonderful story of the Peau de Chagrin, the hero becomes possessed of a magical wild ass' skin, whichyields him the means of gratifying all his wishes. But its surface represents the duration of the proprietor'slife; and for every satisfied desire the skin shrinks in proportion to the intensity of fruition, until at length lifeand the last handbreadth of the peau de chagrin, disappear with the gratification of a last wish.

Balzac's studies had led him over a wide range of thought and speculation, and his shadowing forth ofphysiological truth in this strange story may have been intentional. At any rate, the matter of life is a veritablepeau de chagrin, and for every vital act it is somewhat the smaller. All work implies waste, and the work oflife results, directly or indirectly, in the waste of protoplasm.

Every word uttered by a speaker costs him some physical loss; and, in the strictest sense, he burns that othersmay have light−−so much eloquence, so much of his body resolved into carbonic acid, water, and urea. It isclear that this process of expenditure cannot go on for ever. But, happily, the protoplasmic peau de chagrindiffers from Balzac's in its capacity of being repaired, and brought back to its full size, after every exertion.

For example, this present lecture, whatever its intellectual worth to you, has a certain physical value to me,which is, conceivably, expressible by the number of grains of protoplasm and other bodily substance wastedin maintaining my vital processes during its delivery. My peau de chagrin will be distinctly smaller at the endof the discourse than it was at the beginning. By and by, I shall probably have recourse to the substancecommonly called mutton, for the purpose of stretching it back to its original size. Now this mutton was oncethe living protoplasm, more or less modified, of another animal−−a sheep. As I shall eat it, it is the samematter altered, not only by death, but by exposure to sundry artificial operations in the process of cooking.

But these changes, whatever be their extent, have not rendered it incompetent to resume its old functions asmatter of life. A singular inward laboratory, which I possess, will dissolve a certain portion of the modifiedprotoplasm; the solution so formed will pass into my veins; and the subtle influences to which it will then besubjected will convert the dead protoplasm into living protoplasm, and transubstantiate sheep into man.

Nor is this all. If digestion were a thing to be trifled with, I might sup upon lobster, and the matter of life ofthe crustacean would undergo the same wonderful metamorphosis into humanity. And were I to return to myown place by sea, and undergo shipwreck, the crustacean might, and probably would, return the compliment,and demonstrate our common nature by turning my protoplasm into living lobster. Or, if nothing better wereto be had, I might supply my wants with mere bread, and I should find the protoplasm of the wheat−plant tobe convertible into man, with no more trouble than that of the sheep, and with far less, I fancy, than that ofthe lobster.

Hence it appears to be a matter of no great moment what animal, or what plant, I lay under contribution forprotoplasm, and the fact speaks volumes for the general identity of that substance in all living beings. I sharethis catholicity of assimilation with other animals, all of which, so far as we know, could thrive equally wellon the protoplasm of any of their fellows, or of any plant; but here the assimilative powers of the animalworld cease. A solution of smelling−salts in water, with an infinitesimal proportion of some other salinematters, contains all the elementary bodies which enter into the composition of protoplasm; but, as I needhardly say, a hogshead of that fluid would not keep a hungry man from starving, nor would it save any animalwhatever from a like fate. An animal cannot make protoplasm, but must take it ready−made from some otheranimal, or some plant−−the animal's highest feat of constructive chemistry being to convert dead protoplasminto that living matter of life which is appropriate to itself.



Therefore, in seeking for the origin of protoplasm, we must eventually turn to the vegetable world. A fluidcontaining carbonic acid, water, and nitrogenous salts, which offers such a Barmecide feast to the animal, is atable richly spread to multitudes of plants; and, with a due supply of only such materials, many a plant willnot only maintain itself in vigour, but grow and multiply until it has increased a million−fold, or a millionmillion−fold, the quantity of protoplasm which it originally possessed; in this way building up the matter oflife, to an indefinite extent, from the common matter of the universe.

Thus, the animal can only raise the complex substance of dead protoplasm to the higher power, as one maysay, of living protoplasm; while the plant can raise the less complex substances−− carbonic acid, water, andnitrogenous salts−−to the same stage of living protoplasm, if not to the same level. But the plant also has itslimitations. Some of the fungi, for example, appear to need higher compounds to start with; and no knownplant can live upon the uncompounded elements of protoplasm. A plant supplied with pure carbon, hydrogen,oxygen, and nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur, and the like, would as infallibly die as the animal in his bath ofsmelling−salts, though it would be surrounded by all the constituents of protoplasm. Nor, indeed, need theprocess of simplification of vegetable food be carried so far as this, in order to arrive at the limit of the plant'sthaumaturgy. Let water, carbonic acid, and all the other needful constituents be supplied except nitrogenoussalts, and an ordinary plant will still be unable to manufacture protoplasm.

Thus the matter of life, so far as we know it (and we have no right to speculate on any other), breaks up, inconsequence of that continual death which is the condition of its manifesting vitality, into carbonic acid,water, and nitrogenous compounds, which certainly possess no properties but those of ordinary matter. Andout of these same forms of ordinary matter, and from none which are simpler, the vegetable world builds upall the protoplasm which keeps the animal world a−going. Plants are the accumulators of the power whichanimals distribute and disperse.

But it will be observed, that the existence of the matter of life depends on the pre−existence of certaincompounds; namely, carbonic acid, water, and certain nitrogenous bodies. Withdraw any one of these threefrom the world, and all vital phaenomena come to an end. They are as necessary to the protoplasm of theplant, as the protoplasm of the plant is to that of the animal. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are alllifeless bodies. Of these, carbon and oxygen unite in certain proportions and under certain conditions, to giverise to carbonic acid; hydrogen and oxygen produce water; nitrogen and other elements give rise tonitrogenous salts. These new compounds, like the elementary bodies of which they are composed, are lifeless.But when they are brought together, under certain conditions, they give rise to the still more complex body,protoplasm, and this protoplasm exhibits the phaenomena of life.

I see no break in this series of steps in molecular complication, and I am unable to understand why thelanguage which is applicable to any one term of the series may not be used to any of the others. We think fitto call different kinds of matter carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and to speak of the various powersand activities of these substances as the properties of the matter of which they are composed.

When hydrogen and oxygen are mixed in a certain proportion, and an electric spark is passed through them,they disappear, and a quantity of water, equal in weight to the sum of their weights, appears in their place.There is not the slightest parity between the passive and active powers of the water and those of the oxygenand hydrogen which have given rise to it. At 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and far below that temperature, oxygenand hydrogen are elastic gaseous bodies, whose particles tend to rush away from one another with great force.Water, at the same temperature, is a strong though brittle solid whose particles tend to cohere into definitegeometrical shapes, and sometimes build up frosty imitations of the most complex forms of vegetable foliage.

Nevertheless we call these, and many other strange phaenomena, the properties of the water, and we do nothesitate to believe that, in some way or another, they result from the properties of the component elements ofthe water. We do not assume that a something called "aquosity" entered into and took possession of the



oxidated hydrogen as soon as it was formed, and then guided the aqueous particles to their places in the facetsof the crystal, or amongst the leaflets of the hoar−frost. On the contrary, we live in the hope and in the faiththat, by the advance of molecular physics, we shall by and by be able to see our way as clearly from theconstituents of water to the properties of water, as we are now able to deduce the operations of a watch fromthe form of its parts and the manner in which they are put together.

Is the case in any way changed when carbonic acid, water, and nitrogenous salts disappear, and in their place,under the influence of pre−existing living protoplasm, an equivalent weight of the matter of life makes itsappearance?

It is true that there is no sort of parity between the properties of the components and the properties of theresultant, but neither was there in the case of the water. It is also true that what I have spoken of as theinfluence of pre−existing living matter is something quite unintelligible; but does anybody quite comprehendthe modus operandi of an electric spark, which traverses a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen?

What justification is there, then, for the assumption of the existence in the living matter of a something whichhas no representative, or correlative, in the not living matter which gave rise to it? What better philosophicalstatus has "vitality" than "aquosity"? And why should "vitality" hope for a better fate than the other "itys"which have disappeared since Martinus Scriblerus accounted for the operation of the meat−jack by itsinherent "meat−roasting quality," and scorned the "materialism" of those who explained the turning of thespit by a certain mechanism worked by the draught of the chimney.

If scientific language is to possess a definite and constant signification whenever it is employed, it seems tome that we are logically bound to apply to the protoplasm, or physical basis of life, the same conceptions asthose which are held to be legitimate elsewhere. If the phaenomena exhibited by water are its properties, soare those presented by protoplasm, living or dead, its properties.

If the properties of water may be properly said to result from the nature and disposition of its componentmolecules, I can find no intelligible ground for refusing to say that the properties of protoplasm result fromthe nature and disposition of its molecules.

But I bid you beware that, in accepting these conclusions, you are placing your feet on the first rung of aladder which, in most people's estimation, is the reverse of Jacob's, and leads to the antipodes of heaven. Itmay seem a small thing to admit that the dull vital actions of a fungus, or a foraminifer, are the properties oftheir protoplasm, and are the direct results of the nature of the matter of which they are composed. But if, as Ihave endeavoured to prove to you, their protoplasm is essentially identical with, and most readily convertedinto, that of any animal, I can discover no logical halting−place between the admission that such is the case,and the further concession that all vital action may, with equal propriety, be said to be the result of themolecular forces of the protoplasm which displays it. And if so, it must be true, in the same sense and to thesame extent, that the thoughts to which I am now giving utterance, and your thoughts regarding them, are theexpression of molecular changes in that matter of life which is the source of our other vital phaenomena.

ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS

The marine productions which are commonly known by the names of "Corals" and "Corallines," werethought by the ancients to be sea− weeds, which had the singular property of becoming hard and solid, whenthey were fished up from their native depths and came into contact with the air.

"Sic et curalium, quo primum contigit aurasTempore durescit: mollis fuit herba sub undis,"


ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 55

says Ovid (Metam. xv); and it was not until the seventeenth century that Boccone was emboldened, bypersonal experience of the facts, to declare that the holders of this belief were no better than "idiots," who hadbeen misled by the softness of the outer coat of the living red coral to imagine that it was soft all through.

Messer Boccone's strong epithet is probably undeserved, as the notion he controverts, in all likelihood, arosemerely from the misinterpretation of the strictly true statement which any coral fisherman would make to acurious inquirer; namely, that the outside coat of the red coral is quite soft when it is taken out of the sea. Atany rate, he did good service by eliminating this much error from the current notions about coral. But thebelief that corals are plants remained, not only in the popular, but in the scientific mind; and it received whatappeared to be a striking confirmation from the researches of Marsigli in 1706. For this naturalist, having theopportunity of observing freshly−taken red coral, saw that its branches were beset with what looked likedelicate and beautiful flowers each having eight petals. It was true that these "flowers" could protrude andretract themselves, but their motions were hardly more extensive, or more varied, than those of the leaves ofthe sensitive plant; and therefore they could not be held to militate against the conclusion so stronglysuggested by their form and their grouping upon the branches of a tree−like structure.

Twenty years later, a pupil of Marsigli, the young Marseilles physician, Peyssonel, conceived the desire tostudy these singular sea−plants, and was sent by the French Government on a mission to the Mediterraneanfor that purpose. The pupil undertook the investigation full of confidence in the ideas of his master, but beingable to see and think for himself, he soon discovered that those ideas by no means altogether correspondedwith reality. In an essay entitled "Traite du Corail," which was communicated to the French Academy ofScience, but which has never been published, Peyssonel writes:−−

"Je fis fleurir le corail dans des vases pleins d'eau de mer, et j'observai que ce que nous croyons etre la fleurde cette pretendue plante n'etait au vrai, qu'un insecte semblable a une petite Ortie ou Poulpe. J'avais le plaisirde voir remuer les pattes, ou pieds, de cette Ortie, et ayant mis le vase plein d'eau ou le corail etait a unedouce chaleur aupres du feu, tous les petits insectes s'epanouirent.−−L'Ortie sortie etend les pieds, et forme ceque M. de Marsigli et moi avions pris pour les petales de la fleur. Le calice de cette pretendue fleur est lecorps meme de l'animal avance et sorti hors de la cellule."*

* This extract from Peyssonel's manuscript is given by M. LacazeDuthiers in his valuable Histoire Naturelle du Corail (1866).

The comparison of the flowers of the coral to a "petite ortie," or "little nettle," is perfectly just, but needsexplanation. "Ortie de mer," or "sea−nettle," is, in fact, the French appellation for our "sea−anemone," acreature with which everybody, since the great aquarium mania, must have become familiar, even to thelimits of boredom. In 1710, the great naturalist, Reaumur, had written a memoir for the express purpose ofdemonstrating that these "orties" are animals; and with this important paper Peyssonel must necessarily havebeen familiar. Therefore, when he declared the "flowers" of the red coral to be little "orties," it was the samething as saying that they were animals of the same general nature as sea−anemones. But to Peyssonel'scontemporaries this was an extremely startling announcement. It was hard to imagine the existence of such athing as an association of animals into a structure with stem and branches altogether like a plant, and fixed tothe soil as a plant is fixed; and the naturalists of that day preferred not to imagine it. Even Reaumur could notbring himself to accept the notion, and France being blessed with Academicians, whose great function (as thelate Bishop Wilson and an eminent modern writer have so well shown) is to cause sweetness and light toprevail, and to prevent such unmannerly fellows as Peyssonel from blurting out unedifying truths, theysuppressed him; and, as aforesaid, his great work remained in manuscript, and may at this day be consultedby the curious in that state, in the Bibliotheque du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle. Peyssonel, who evidentlywas a person of savage and untameable disposition, so far from appreciating the kindness of theAcademicians in giving him time to reflect upon the unreasonableness, not to say rudeness, of making publicstatements in opposition to the views of some of the most distinguished of their body, seems bitterly to have



resented the treatment he met with. For he sent all further communications to the Royal Society of London,which never had, and it is to be hoped never will have, anything of an academic constitution; and finally hetook himself off to Guadaloupe, and became lost to science altogether.

Fifteen or sixteen years after the date of Peyssonel's suppressed paper, the Abbe Trembley published hiswonderful researches upon the fresh−water Hydra. Bernard de Jussieu and Guettard followed them up by likeinquiries upon the marine sea−anemones and corallines; Reaumur, convinced against his will of the entirejustice of Peyssonel's views, adopted them, and made him a half−and−half apology in the preface to the nextpublished volume of the "Memoires pour servir l'Histoire des Insectes;" and, from this time forth, Peyssonel'sdoctrine that corals are the work of animal organisms has been part of the body of established scientific truth.

Peyssonel, in the extract from his memoir already cited, compares the flower−like animal of the coral to a"poulpe," which is the French form of the name "polypus,"−−"the many−footed,"−−which the ancientnaturalists gave to the soft−bodied cuttlefishes, which, like the coral animal, have eight arms, or tentacles,disposed around a central mouth. Reaumur, admitting the analogy indicated by Peyssonel, gave the name ofpolypes, not only to the sea− anemone, the coral animal, and the fresh−water Hydra, but to what are nowknown as the Polyzoa, and he termed the skeleton which they fabricate a "polypier," or "polypidom."

The progress of discovery, since Reaumur's time, has made us very completely acquainted with the structureand habits of all these polypes. We know that, among the sea−anemones and coral−forming animals, eachpoylpe has a mouth leading to a stomach, which is open at its inner end, and thus communicates freely withthe general cavity of the body; that the tentacles placed round the mouth are hollow, and that they perform thepart of arms in seizing and capturing prey. It is known that many of these creatures are capable of beingmultiplied by artificial division, the divided halves growing, after a time, into complete and separate animals;and that many are able to perform a very similar process naturally, in such a manner that one polype may, byrepeated incomplete divisions, give rise to a sort of sheet, or turf, formed by innumerable connected, and yetindependent, descendants. Or, what is still more common, a polype may throw out buds, which are convertedinto polypes, or branches bearing polypes, until a tree− like mass, sometimes of very considerable size, isformed.

This is what happens in the case of the red coral of commerce. A minute polype, fixed to the rocky bottom ofthe deep sea, grows up into a branched trunk. The end of every branch and twig is terminated by a polype;and all the polypes are connected together by a fleshy substance, traversed by innumerable canals whichplace each polype in communication with every other, and carry nourishment to the substance of thesupporting stem. It is a sort of natural cooperative store, every polype helping the whole, at the same time asit helps itself. The interior of the stem, like that of the branches, is solidified by the deposition of carbonate oflime in its tissue, somewhat in the same fashion as our own bones are formed of animal matter impregnatedwith lime salts; and it is this dense skeleton (usually turned red by a peculiar colouring matter) cleared of thesoft animal investment, as the hard wood of a tree might be stripped of its bark, which is the red coral.

In the case of the red coral, the hard skeleton belongs to the interior of the stem and branches only; but in thecommoner white corals, each polype has a complete skeleton of its own. These polypes are sometimessolitary, in which case the whole skeleton is represented by a single cup, with partitions radiating from itscentre to its circumference. When the polypes formed by budding or division remain associated, thepolypidom is sometimes made up of nothing but an aggregation of these cups, while at other times the cupsare at once separated and held together, by an intermediate substance, which represents the branches of thered coral. The red coral polype again is a comparatively rare animal, inhabiting a limited area, the skeleton ofwhich has but a very insignificant mass; while the white corals are very common, occur in almost all seas,and form skeletons which are sometimes extremely massive.



With a very few exceptions, both the red and the white coral polypes are, in their adult state, firmly adherentto the sea− bottom; nor do their buds naturally become detached and locomotive. But, in addition to buddingand division, these creatures possess the more ordinary methods of multiplication; and, at particular seasons,they give rise to numerous eggs of minute size. Within these eggs the young are formed, and they leave theegg in a condition which has no sort of resemblance to the perfect animal. It is, in fact, a minute oval body,many hundred times smaller than the full grown creature, and it swims about with great activity by the helpof multitudes of little hair−like filaments, called cilia, with which its body is covered. These cilia all lash thewater in one direction, and so drive the little body along as if it were propelled by thousands of extremelyminute paddles. After enjoying its freedom for a longer or shorter time, and being carried either by the forceof its own cilia, or by currents which bear it along, the embryo coral settles down to the bottom, loses its cilia,and becomes fixed to the rock, gradually assuming the polype form and growing up to the size of its parent.As the infant polypes of the coral may retain this free and active condition for many hours, or even days, andas a tidal or other current in the sea may easily flow at the speed of two or even more miles in an hour, it isclear that the embryo must often be transported to very considerable distances from the parent. And it iseasily understood how a single polype, which may give rise to hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of embryos,may, by this process of partly active and partly passive migration, cover an immense surface with itsoffspring.

The masses of coral which may be formed by the assemblages of polypes which spring by budding, or bydividing, from a single polype, occasionally attain very considerable dimensions. Such skeletons aresometimes great plates, many feet long and several feet in thickness; or they may form huge half globes, likethe brainstone corals, or may reach the magnitude of stout shrubs or even small trees. There is reason tobelieve that such masses as these take a long time to form, and hence that the age a polype tree, or polypeturf, may attain, may be considerable. But, sooner or later, the coral polypes, like all other things, die; the softflesh decays, while the skeleton is left as a stony mass at the bottom of the sea, where it retains its integrityfor a longer or a shorter time, according as its position affords more or less protection from the wear and tearof the waves.

The polypes which give rise to the white coral are found, as has been said, in the seas of all parts of theworld; but in the temperate and cold oceans they are scattered and comparatively small in size, so that theskeletons of those which die do not accumulate in any considerable quantity. But it is otherwise in the greaterpart of the ocean which lies in the warmer parts of the world, comprised within a distance of about eighteenhundred miles on each side of the equator. Within the zone thus bounded, by far the greater part of the oceanis inhabited by coral polypes, which not only form very strong and large skeletons, but associate together intogreat masses, like the thickets and the meadow turf, or, better still, the accumulations of peat, to which plantsgive rise on dry land. These masses of stony matter, heaped up beneath the waters of the ocean, become asdangerous to mariners as so much ordinary rock, and to these, as to the common rock ridges, the seamangives the name of "reefs."

Such coral reefs cover many thousand square miles in the Pacific and in the Indian Oceans. There is one reef,or rather great series of reefs, called the Barrier Reef, which stretches, almost continuously, for more thaneleven hundred miles off the east coast of Australia. Multitudes of the islands in the Pacific are either reefsthemselves, or are surrounded by reefs. The Red Sea is in many parts almost a maze of such reefs, and theyabound no less in the West Indies, along the coast of Florida, and even as far north as the Bahama Islands.But it is a very remarkable circumstance that, within the area of what we may call the "coral zone," there areno coral reefs upon the west coast of America, nor upon the west coast of Africa; and it is a general fact thatthe reefs are interrupted, or absent, opposite the mouths of great rivers. The causes of this apparent caprice inthe distribution of coral reefs are not far to seek. The polypes which fabricate them require for their vigorousgrowth a temperature which must not fall below 68 degrees Fahrenheit all the year round, and thistemperature is only to be found within the distance on each side of the equator which has been mentioned, orthereabouts. But even within the coral zone this degree of warmth is not everywhere to be had. On the west



coast of America, and on the corresponding coast of Africa, the currents of cold water from the icy regionswhich surround the South Pole set northward, and it appears to be due to their cooling influence that the seain these regions is free from the reef builders. Again, the coral polypes cannot live in water which is renderedbrackish by floods from the land, or which is perturbed by mud from the same source, and hence it is thatthey cease to exist opposite the mouths of rivers, which damage them in both these ways.

Such is the general distribution of the reef−building corals, but there are some very interesting and singularcircumstances to be observed in the conformation of the reefs, when we consider them individually. Thereefs, in fact, are of three different kinds; some of them stretch out from the shore, almost like a prolongationof the beach, covered only by shallow water, and in the case of an island, surrounding it like a fringe of noconsiderable breadth. These are termed "fringing reefs." Others are separated by a channel which may attain awidth of many miles, and a depth of twenty or thirty fathoms or more, from the nearest land; and when thisland is an island, the reef surrounds it like a low wall, and the sea between the reef and the land is, as it were,a moat inside this wall. Such reefs as these are called "encircling" when they surround an island; and "barrier"reefs, when they stretch parallel with the coast of a continent. In both these cases there is ordinary dry landinside the reef, and separated from it only by a narrower or a wider, a shallower or a deeper, space of sea,which is called a "lagoon," or "inner passage." But there is a third kind of reef, of very common occurrence inthe Pacific and Indian Oceans, which goes by the name of "atoll." This is, to all intents and purposes, anencircling reef, without anything to encircle; or, in other words, without an island in the middle of its lagoon.The atoll has exactly the appearance of a vast, irregularly oval, or circular, breakwater, enclosing smoothwater in its midst. The depth of the water in the lagoon rarely exceeds twenty or thirty fathoms, but, outsidethe reef, it deepens with great rapidity to two hundred or three hundred fathoms. The depth immediatelyoutside the barrier, or encircling, reefs, may also be very considerable; but, at the outer edge of a fringingreef, it does not amount usually to more than twenty or twenty−five fathoms; in other words, from onehundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty feet.

Thus, if the water of the ocean should be suddenly drained away, we should see the atolls rising from thesea−bed like vast truncated cones, and resembling so many volcanic craters, except that their sides would besteeper than those of an ordinary volcano. In the case of the encircling reefs, the cone, with the enclosedisland, would look like Vesuvius with Monte Nuovo within the old crater of Somma; while, finally, the islandwith a fringing reef would have the appearance of an ordinary hill, or mountain, girded by a vast parapet,within which would lie a shallow moat. And the dry bed of the Pacific might afford grounds for an inhabitantof the moon to speculate upon the extraordinary subterranean activity to which these vast and numerous"craters" bore witness!

When the structure of a fringing reef is investigated, the bottom of the lagoon is found to be covered with finewhitish mud, which results from the breaking up of the dead corals. Upon this muddy floor there lie, here andthere, growing corals, or occasionally great blocks of dead coral, which have been torn by storms from theouter edge of the reef, and washed into the lagoon. Shellfish and worms of various kinds abound; and fish,some of which prey upon the coral, sport in the deeper pools. But the corals which are to be seen growing inthe shallow waters of the lagoon are of a different kind from those which abound on the outer edge of thereef, and of which the reef is built up. Close to the seaward edge of the reef, over which, even in calmweather, a surf almost always breaks, the coral rock is encrusted with a thick coat of a singular vegetableorganism, which contains a great deal of lime−−the so− called Nullipora. Beyond this, in the part of the edgeof the reef which is always covered by the breaking waves, the living, true, reef−polypes make theirappearance; and, in different forms, coat the steep seaward face of the reef to a depth of one hundred or evenone hundred and fifty feet. Beyond this depth the sounding− lead rests, not upon the wall−like face of thereef, but on the ordinary shelving sea−bottom. And the distance to which a fringing reef extends from theland corresponds with that at which the sea has a depth of twenty or five−and−twenty fathoms.



If, as we have supposed, the sea could be suddenly withdrawn from around an island provided with a fringingreef, such as the Mauritius, the reef would present the aspect of a terrace, its seaward face, one hundred feetor more high, blooming with the animal flowers of the coral, while its surface would be hollowed out into ashallow and irregular moat−like excavation.

The coral mud, which occupies the bottom of the lagoon, and with which all the interstices of the coralskeletons which accumulate to form the reef are filled up, does not proceed from the washing action of thewaves alone; innumerable fishes, and other creatures which prey upon the coral, add a very importantcontribution of finely−triturated calcareous matter; and the corals and mud becoming incorporated together,gradually harden and give rise to a sort of limestone rock, which may vary a good deal in texture. Sometimesit remains friable and chalky, but, more often, the infiltration of water, charged with carbonic acid, dissolvessome of the calcareous matter, and deposits it elsewhere in the interstices of the nascent rock, thus glueingand cementing the particles together into a hard mass; or it may even dissolve the carbonate of lime moreextensively, and re−deposit it in a crystalline form. On the beach of the lagoon, where the coral sand iswashed into layers by the action of the waves, its grains become thus fused together into strata of a limestone,so hard that they ring when struck with a hammer, and inclined at a gentle angle, corresponding with that ofthe surface of the beach. The hard parts of the many animals which live upon the reef become imbedded inthis coral limestone, so that a block may be full of shells of bivalves and univalves, or of sea urchins; andeven sometimes encloses the eggs of turtles in a state of petrification. The active and vigorous growth of thereef goes on only at the seaward margins, where the polypes are exposed to the wash of the surf, and arethereby provided with an abundant supply of air and of food. The interior portion of the reef may be regardedas almost wholly an accumulation of dead skeletons. Where a river comes down from the land there is abreak in the reef, for the reasons which have been already mentioned.

The origin and mode of formation of a fringing reef, such as that just described, are plain enough. Theembryos of the coral polypes have fixed themselves upon the submerged shore of the island, as far out as theycould live, namely, to a depth of twenty or twenty− five fathoms. One generation has succeeded another,building itself up upon the dead skeletons of its predecessor. The mass has been consolidated by theinfiltration of coral mud, and hardened by partial solution and redeposition, until a great rampart of coral rockone hundred or one hundred and fifty feet high on its seaward face has been formed all round the island, withonly such gaps as result from the outflow of rivers, in the place of sally−ports.

The structure of the rocky accumulation in the encircling reefs and in the atolls is essentially the same as inthe fringing reef. But, in addition to the differences of depth inside and out, they present some otherpeculiarities. These reefs, and especially the atolls, are usually interrupted at one part of their circumference,and this part is always situated on the leeward side of the reef, or that which is the more sheltered side. Now,as all these reefs are situated within the region in which the tradewinds prevail, it follows that, on the northside of the equator, where the trade− wind is a northeasterly wind, the opening of the reef is on the southwestside: while in the southern hemisphere, where the trade− winds blow from the southeast, the opening lies tothe northwest. The curious practical result follows from this structure, that the lagoons to these reefs reallyform admirable harbours, if a ship can only get inside them. But the main difference between the encirclingreefs and the atolls, on the one hand, and the fringing reefs on the other, lies in the fact of the much greaterdepth of water on the seaward faces of the former. As a consequence of this fact, the whole of this face is not,as it is in the case of the fringing reef, covered with living coral polypes. For, as we have seen, these polypescannot live at a greater depth than about twenty−five fathoms; and actual observation has shown that while,down to this depth, the sounding−lead will bring up branches of live coral from the outer wall of such a reef,at a greater depth it fetches to the surface nothing but dead coral and coral sand. We must, therefore, pictureto ourselves an atoll, or an encircling reef, as fringed for one hundred feet, or more, from its summit, withcoral polypes busily engaged in fabricating coral; while, below this comparatively narrow belt, its surface is abare and smooth expanse of coral sand, supported upon and within a core of coral limestone. Thus, if the bedof the Pacific were suddenly laid bare, as was just now supposed, the appearance of the reef− mountains



would be exactly the reverse of that presented by many high mountains on land. For these are white withsnow at the top, while their bases are clothed with an abundant and gaudily−coloured vegetation. But thecoral cones would look grey and barren below, while their summits would be gay with a richly−colouredparterre of flowerlike coral polypes.

The practical difficulties of sounding upon, and of bringing up portions of, the seaward face of an atoll or ofan encircling reef, are so great, in consequence of the constant and dangerous swell which sets towards it, thatno exact information concerning the depth to which the reefs are composed of coral has yet been obtained.There is no reason to doubt, however, that the reef−cone has the same structure from its summit to its base,and that its sea−wall is throughout mainly composed of dead coral.

And now arises a serious difficulty. If the coral polypes cannot live at a greater depth than one hundred or onehundred and fifty feet, how can they have built up the base of the reef−cone, which may be two thousandfeet, or more, below the surface of the sea?

In order to get over this objection, it was at one time supposed that the reef−building polypes had settled uponthe summits of a chain of submarine mountains. But what is there in physical geography to justify theassumption of the existence of a chain of mountains stretching for one thousand miles or more, and so nearlyof the same height, that none should rise above the level of the sea, nor fall one hundred and fifty feet belowthat level?

How, again, on this hypothesis, are atolls to be accounted for, unless, as some have done, we take refuge inthe wild supposition that every atoll corresponds with the crater of a submarine volcano? And whatexplanation does it afford of the fact that, in some parts of the ocean, only atolls and encircling reefs occur,while others present none but fringing reefs?

These and other puzzling facts remained insoluble until the publication, in the year 1840, of Mr. Darwin'sfamous work on coral reefs; in which a key was given to all the difficult problems connected with the subject,and every difficulty was shown to be capable of solution by deductive reasoning from a happy combinationof certain well−established geological and biological truths. Mr. Darwin, in fact, showed that, so long as thelevel of the sea remains unaltered in any area in which coral reefs are being formed, or if the level of the searelatively to that of the land is falling, the only reefs which can be formed are fringing reefs. While if, on thecontrary, the level of the sea is rising relatively to that of the land, at a rate not faster than that at which theupward growth of the coral can keep pace with it, the reef will gradually pass from the condition of afringing, into that of an encircling or barrier reef. And, finally, that if the relative level of the sea rise so muchthat the encircled land is completely submerged, the reef must necessarily pass into the condition of an atoll.

For, suppose the relative level of the sea to remain stationary, after a fringing reef has reached that distancefrom the land at which the depth of water amounts to one hundred and fifty feet. Then the reef cannot extendseaward by the migration of coral germs, because these coral germs would find the bottom of the sea to betoo deep for them to live in. And the only manner in which the reef could extend outwards, would be by thegradual accumulation, at the foot of its seaward face, of a talus of coral fragments torn off by the violence ofthe waves, which talus might, in course of time, become high enough to bring its upper surface within thelimits of coral growth, and in that manner provide a sort of factitious sea−bottom upon which the coralembryos might perch. If, on the other hand, the level of the sea were slowly and gradually lowered, it is clearthat the parts of its bottom originally beyond the limit of coral growth would gradually be brought within therequired distance of the surface, and thus the reef might be indefinitely extended. But this process would giverise neither to an encircling reef nor to an atoll, but to a broad belt of upheaved coral rock, increasing thedimensions of the dry land, and continuous seawards with the fresh fringing reef.



Suppose, however, that the sea−level rose instead of falling, at the same slow and gradual rate at which weknow it to be rising in some parts of the world,−−not more, in fact, than a few inches, or, at most, a foot ortwo, in a hundred years. Then, while the reef would be unable to extend itself seaward, the sea−bottomoutside it being gradually more and more removed from the depth at which the life of the coral polypes ispossible, it would be able to grow upwards as fast as the sea rose. But the growth would take place almostexclusively around the circumference of the reef, this being the only region in which the coral polypes wouldfind the conditions favourable for their existence. The bottom of the lagoon would be raised, in the main, onlyby the coral debris and coral mud, formed in the manner already described; consequently, the margins of thereef would rise faster than the bottom, or, in other words, the lagoon would constantly become deeper. And,at the same time, it would gradually increase in breadth; as the rising sea, covering more of the land, wouldoccupy a wider space between the edge of the reef and what remained of the land. Thus the rising sea wouldeventually convert a large island with a fringing reef into a small island surrounded by an encircling reef. Andit will be obvious that when the rising of the sea has gone so far as completely to cover the highest points ofthe island, the reef will have passed into the condition of an atoll.

But how is it possible that the relative level of the land and sea should be altered to this extent? Clearly, onlyin one of two ways: either the sea must have risen over those areas which are now covered by atolls andencircling reefs; or, the land upon which the sea rests must have been depressed to a corresponding extent.

If the sea has risen, its rise must have taken place over the whole world simultaneously, and it must haverisen to the same height over all parts of the coral zone. Grounds have been shown for the belief that thegeneral level of the sea may have been different at different times; it has been suggested, for example, that theaccumulation of ice about the poles during one of the cold periods of the earth's history necessarily implies adiminution in the volume of the sea proportioned to the amount of its water thus permanently locked up in theArctic and Antarctic ice−cellars; while, in the warm periods, the greater or less disappearance of the polarice−cap implies a corresponding addition of water to the ocean. And no doubt this reasoning must beadmitted to be sound in principle; though it is very hard to say what practical effect the additions andsubtractions thus made have had on the level of the ocean; inasmuch as such additions and subtractions mightbe either intensified or nullified, by contemporaneous changes in the level of the land. And no one has yetshown that any such great melting of polar ice, and consequent raising of the level of the water of the ocean,has taken place since the existing atolls began to be formed.

In the absence of any evidence that the sea has ever risen to the extent required to give rise to the encirclingreefs and the atolls, Mr. Darwin adopted the opposite hypothesis, viz., that the land has undergone extensiveand slow depression in those localities in which these structures exist.

It seems, at first, a startling paradox, to suppose that the land is less fixed than the sea; but that such is thecase is the uniform testimony of geology. Beds of sandstone or limestone, thousands of feet thick, and all fullof marine remains, occur in various parts of the earth's surface, and prove, beyond a doubt, that when thesebeds were formed, that portion of the sea−bottom which they then occupied underwent a slow and gradualdepression to a distance which cannot have been less than the thickness of those beds, and may have beenvery much greater. In supposing, therefore, that the great areas of the Pacific and of the Indian Ocean, overwhich atolls and encircling reefs are found scattered, have undergone a depression of some hundreds, or, itmay be, thousands of feet, Mr. Darwin made a supposition which had nothing forced or improbable, but wasentirely in accordance with what we know to have taken place over similarly extensive areas, in other periodsof the world's history. But Mr. Darwin subjected his hypothesis to an ingenious indirect test. If his view becorrect, it is clear that neither atolls, nor encircling reefs, should be found in those portions of the ocean inwhich we have reason to believe, on independent grounds, that the sea−bottom has long been eitherstationary, or slowly rising. Now it is known that, as a general rule, the level of the land is either stationary,or is undergoing a slow upheaval, in the neighborhood of active volcanoes; and, therefore, neither atolls norencircling reefs ought to be found in regions in which volcanoes are numerous and active. And this turns out



to be the case. Appended to Mr. Darwin's great work on coral reefs, there is a map on which atolls andencircling reefs are indicated by one colour, fringing reefs by another, and active volcanoes by a third. And itis at once obvious that the lines of active volcanoes lie around the margins of the areas occupied by the atollsand the encircling reefs. It is exactly as if the upheaving volcanic agencies had lifted up the edges of thesegreat areas, while their centres had undergone a corresponding depression. An atoll area may, in short, bepictured as a kind of basin, the margins of which have been pushed up by the subterranean forces, to whichthe craters of the volcanoes have, at intervals, given vent.

Thus we must imagine the area of the Pacific now covered by the Polynesian Archipelago, as having been, atsome former time, occupied by large islands, or, may be, by a great continent, with the ordinarily diversifiedsurface of plain, and hill, and mountain chain. The shores of this great land were doubtless fringed by coralreefs; and, as it slowly underwent depression, the hilly regions, converted into islands, became, at first,surrounded by fringing reefs, and then, as depression went on, these became converted into encircling reefs,and these, finally, into atolls, until a maze of reefs and coral−girdled islets took the place of the original landmasses.

Thus the atolls and the encircling reefs furnish us with clear, though indirect, evidence of changes in thephysical geography of large parts of the earth's surface; and even, as my lamented friend, the late ProfessorJukes, has suggested, give us indications of the manner in which some of the most puzzling facts connectedwith the distribution of animals have been brought about. For example, Australia and New Guinea areseparated by Torres Straits, a broad belt of sea one hundred or one hundred and twenty miles wide.Nevertheless, there is in many respects a curious resemblance between the land animals which inhabit NewGuinea and the land animals which inhabit Australia. But, at the same time, the marine shellfish which arefound in the shallow waters of the shores of New Guinea are quite different from those which are met withupon the coasts of Australia. Now, the eastern end of Torres Straits is full of atolls, which, in fact, form thenorthern termination of the Great Barrier Reef which skirts the eastern coast of Australia. It follows,therefore, that the eastern end of Torres Straits is an area of depression, and it is very possible, and on manygrounds highly probable, that, in former times, Australia and New Guinea were directly connected together,and that Torres Straits did not exist. If this were the case, the existence of cassowaries and of marsupialquadrupeds, both in New Guinea and in Australia, becomes intelligible; while the difference between thelittoral molluscs of the north and the south shores of Torres Straits is readily explained by the greatprobability that, when the depression in question took place, and what was, at first, an arm of the sea becameconverted into a strait separating Australia from New Guinea, the northern shore of this new sea becametenanted with marine animals from the north, while the southern shore was peopled by immigrants from thealready existing marine Australian fauna.

Inasmuch as the growth of the reef depends upon that of successive generations of coral polypes, and as eachgeneration takes a certain time to grow to its full size, and can only separate its calcareous skeleton from thewater in which it lives at a certain rate, it is clear that the reefs are records not only of changes in physicalgeography, but of the lapse of time. It is by no means easy, however, to estimate the exact value of reefchronology, and the attempts which have been made to determine the rate at which a reef grows verticallyhave yielded anything but precise results. A cautious writer, Mr. Dana, whose extensive study of corals andcoral reefs makes him an eminently competent judge, states his conclusion in the following terms:−−

"The rate of growth of the common branching madrepore is not over one and a half inches a year. As thebranches are open, this would not be equivalent to more than half an inch in height of solid coral for thewhole surface covered by the madrepore; and, as they are also porous, to not over three−eighths of an inch ofsolid limestone. But a coral plantation has large bare patches without corals, and the coral sands are widelydistributed by currents, part of them to depths over one hundred feet where there are no living corals; notmore than one−sixth of the surface of a reef region is, in fact, covered with growing species. This reduces thethree−eighths to ONE−SIXTEENTH. Shells and other organic relics may contribute one−fourth as much as



corals. At the outside, the average upward increase of the whole reef−ground per year would not exceedONE−EIGHTH of an inch.

"Now some reefs are at least two thousand feet thick, which at one− eighth of an inch a year, corresponds toone hundred and ninety−two thousand years."*

* Dana, Manual of Geology, p. 591.

Halve, or quarter, this estimate if you will, in order to be certain of erring upon the right side, and still thereremains a prodigious period during which the ancestors of existing coral polypes have been undisturbedly atwork; and during which, therefore, the climatal conditions over the coral area must have been much whatthey are now.

And all this lapse of time has occurred within the most recent period of the history of the earth. The remainsof reefs formed by coral polypes of different kinds from those which exist now, enter largely into thecomposition of the limestones of the Jurassic period; and still more widely different coral polypes havecontributed their quota to the vast thickness of the carboniferous and Devonian strata. Then as regards thelatter group of rocks in America, the high authority already quoted tells us:−−

"The Upper Helderberg period is eminently the coral reef period of the palaeozoic ages. Many of the rocksabound in coral, and are as truly coral reefs as the modern reefs of the Pacific. The corals are sometimesstanding on the rocks in the position they had when growing: others are lying in fragments, as they werebroken and heaped by the waves; and others were reduced to a compact limestone by the finer triturationbefore consolidation into rock. This compact variety is the most common kind among the coral reef rocks ofthe present seas; and it often contains but few distinct fossils, although formed in water that abounded in life.At the fall of the Ohio, near Louisville, there is a magnificent display of the old reef. HemisphericalFavosites, five or six feet in diameter, lie there nearly as perfect as when they were covered by theirflowerlike polypes; and besides these, there are various branching corals, and a profusion of Cyathophyllia,or cup− corals."*

* Dana, Manual of Geology, p. 272.

Thus, in all the great periods of the earth's history of which we know anything, a part of the then living matterhas had the form of polypes, competent to separate from the water of the sea the carbonate of lime necessaryfor their own skeletons. Grain by grain, and particle by particle, they have built up vast masses of rock, thethickness of which is measured by hundreds of feet, and their area by thousands of square miles. The slowoscillations of the crust of the earth, producing great changes in the distribution of land and water, have oftenobliged the living matter of the coral−builders to shift the locality of its operations; and, by variation andadaptation to these modifications of condition, its forms have as often changed. The work it has done in thepast is, for the most part, swept away, but fragments remain, and, if there were no other evidence, suffice toprove the general constancy of the operations of Nature in this world, through periods of almostinconceivable duration.



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Autobiography and Selected Essays - 93beast.fea.st93beast.fea.st/files/section1/huxley/extras/Auto and Essays.pdf · His autobiography gives a full account of his parents, his early